Color Printing Today

Color printing is one of the longest existing printing service around and one of the most expensive too. However with the new innovations and development in printing technology, color printing has been given a new look using new technologies and techniques such as digital lithographing. Aside from that color printing was also made more affordable compared to what it cost five to ten years ago.

Color printing that is commonly employed today makes use of offset lithography. The process of offset lithography includes the coating of a rubber drum with the color plus water in order to produce the desired image. Afterwards the image is transferred to the offset drum where it is to be transferred again to the printable medium such as paper, wood, cloth, metal, leather, rough and smooth paper and many more.

Color printing is not only involved with offset printing but also with other printing procedures such as four color process printing and six color process printing which is an emerging color printing method. The difference between these two color printing processes is the addition of colors orange and green to the traditional CMYK used on four color process printing. So for six color process printing you will have to deal with the colors cyan, magenta, yellow, black plus the two additional color orange and green. With the additional two colors, you will be able to produce larger and more vibrant gamut or color range.

There are various steps or transformation involves in color printing which are needed to produce quality color reproduction. Here are some of them:

* Color Separation Process

Color separation occurs when the original artwork is digitally scanned and separated into red, green and blue components. The traditional way of conducting color separation is by photographing the image three times using a filter for each color. This procedure would result to three grayscale images in red, green and blue or the RGB components of the original image.

The second step is to invert the three grayscale images. The negative image of the red component that is produced represents the cyan component of the image. Similarly the green and blue components are inverted to produce magenta and yellow separations. The inversion process is done because magenta, yellow and cyan are subtractive primaries which represent the additive primaries RGB.

* Screening

The inks used for color printing presses are semi-transparent and are printed on top of each other in order to produce different hues. The screening process is used since the printing press just cannot vary the amount of ink applied. The screening process represents lighter shades as tiny dots rather than solid areas of ink. Screening is used especially in producing colored photographs for newspapers and other similar print jobs.