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guide to print

1. ARTWORKING
2. PROOFING
3. PAPER STOCK
4. PRINTING
5. FINISHING
6. USEFUL INFORMATION

plant list

“Colours, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”

Pablo Picasso

1. artwork

This refers to any form of media supplied to print from, it can be emailed, on a disk, USB or uploaded to a FTP site (this is like a direct computer transfer). In the old days we used to have camera ready artwork (this was an actual hard copy of what was required) – which as the name suggests was put into a camera and shot to film. Film is now generally a thing of the past and the large cameras are no longer used. This is why jobs are still referred to as artwork. Jobs are normally printed in 4 process colours, single colour or special colours. In theory if you printed a solid of cyan (a blue), yellow and magenta (a red) on top of each other it would give you a solid black – in fact it will give you a brown which is why a 4th colour (black) is added to make the print stronger. This process is often referred to as CMYK (the Y being black to stop it being confused with blue). Using the pigment primary colour (with the added black) you should be able to print any colour under the rainbow (this is as opposed to the primary colours of light Red Green and Blue – if you want to understand more on this I suggest you go to a Physics web site which will explain in more detail) – this is nearly true – but to get perfect colours you print in a single colour made specially to a given formula (this applies to some company logo’s or corporate colours). These special colours are generally matched to PMS colours (Pantone Matching Systems) which are very similar to the paint cards you might see in hardware stores – but giving many 1000’s of options and even metallic colours that actually have an element of metal added to make them look metallic.

read about proofing

prepress

AT PRINCIPAL COLOUR WE TAKE CARE OF THE PREPRESS PROCESS. WE WILL TAKE EXTRA CARE TO MAKE SURE YOUR ARTWORK IS SET UP CORRECTLY.