Chapter 2: Ink on Paper

•Halftone Dots: Are very small ranging sized dots of ink on a page to manipulate different tones or shades of a single colored ink.

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Units of Measure :

•DPI (Dots Per Inch): Refers to the amount of dots in a squares inch of a design. Typically the more dots on a page the better the quality and sharpness of a photo printed.

•LPI (Lines Per Inch):  also affects the sharpness of print (higher the better), but measures not the dots within an inch but the frequency of halftone dots appearing in a square inch. One regulation that LPI has to follow is the thickness of the paper, the thinner the paper print is going to appear on, the lower the LPI number should be to reduce the risk of  inks absorbing into unwanted areas of the print.

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•PPI (Points Per Inch): is another important practice in print. This tells a designer and printer the points per inch on a specific image, or resolution. Once again the higher the number, the better the resolution, and the clearer the image. PPI can be reduced by increasing the size of an image so it is better to downsize when designing than to expand to avoid bad resolution.

Color Printing: CMYK vs. RGB

•RGB (Red, Green, Blue): These colors pertain to the tiny dots of visible light that make up a display on a monitor. These colors consist of Red, Green and Blue and practice the same rules of PPI Resolution.

•CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black): relate to the process colors that use halftone dot  system of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black but also layer these colors during print to create a wide range of colors for an illusion of an image.

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•Color Management: Matching RGB (design on display monitor) to CMYK (design on printed page) is too difficult to guess at how the final job is going to turn out, so a designer must use Pantone color swatches to view what a color looks like when printed. Each Pantone color has a specific formula of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black and have a specific number to identify that specific Pantone color. This number can be used for located the specific color while designing on the RGB screen, so the designer has a closer chance at getting the exact design colors when processed.

•Spot Colors: Sometimes CMYK cannot reach all the colors of a design because CMYK does not contain all the colors of the color spectrum. In order to receive the colors desired for a job, sometimes a processor will bring in spot colors which are specially formulated inks that cannot be reproduced by CMYK (example: metallic colors).

•Registration: simply is the alignment of a printers CMYK when layering. This isn’t so much as a problem when a variation of colors is present and trapping can be used, but can be especially damaging to a design that has a two colors that don’t have an ink in common or have break in color. Misregistration can make a design look messy and unprofessional so it is important for a designer to check the registration before printing a large job.

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•Rich Black: Large areas of solid black in a design can be difficult to produce with just regular CMYK dots, so sometimes it is necessary to use a specialized color of 60 cyan, 40 magenta, 40 yellow and 100 black to formulate rich black. This specialization will help make the large portion of black on a design seem thick and smooth, making a cleaner design when finished.

Source: McCue, Claudia. Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications. Peachpit Press: Berkeley, CA, 2009.