Consideration for preparing digital artwork or layout that will be commercially printed
Adobe Illustraor
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe InDesign
Making sure we use these tool correctly so our designs print correctly
Commercial Print?
Offset Lithography- adobe illustrator ext were made to work with offset lithography
Digital Printing- lazer printers ext.
Screen Printing- still a commercial demand for screen printing
Main focus will be the use of colour in software
Digital Colour Modes
CMYK- (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) subtractive colour, ink on paper
RGB- (red, green and blue) additive colour, light via monitor, project ect.
CMYK mode is used to define colour as it is when created during the printing process, sometimes referred to as process colour, or four colour printing.
CMYK works as ink mixing on the paper, the inks are transparent and mix together to create the colour.
Diagram of CMYK- K is in the middle the 'key' colour
CMYK usually works by having each of the four colours applied on top of each other
We need to think go colour as ink!
Registration marks line the colours up when printing, they are always outside the trim area
Making sure that the document is in CMYK mode, there are various places that you can check this
creating new colour swatches in illustraor
Global swatches
A global colour is automatically updated throughout your artwork when you edit it. All spot colours are global.
Global colour swatches allow you to look at the tints of the colour and add new swatches from that, this is useful for making colour palettes
above is an image of how all the colours get layered on top of each other when printing
a couple of useful tools that I didn't previously know about was 'select all unused colours' this is useful when you start out on illustrator with a new document and want to delete all colours and start with a fresh colour palette. Also 'add used colours' this is useful if you have created some artwork in illustrator and haven't made colour swatches this will select all of the colours and make them into global swatches.
Spot colours
think of it as pots of colours of ink
when you screen print you use spot inks
spot colours are used in the commercial print industry for a number of reasons:
-they are much cheaper to use
-use less ink
-ink is applied during the pruning process using printing plates
-economical
-consistency of colour
-consistency in application
Spot colours, metallics and neons can be printed
Each spot colour when you design will need a separate printing plate when printing
Pantone colours, each one of those are spot colours
It is important when working with pantone spot colours that we don't change the name of the colours, as when your document gets sent off to be printed it won't work
above are the colour swatches for pantone solid colour, there is a useful search bar at the top to search what number colour you want
Once you have got all the colours that you wanted and you have made a colour palette you can save the colour palate and use it in a variety of adobe programmes this is useful commercially if a certain house style needs to be consistent.
No comments:
Post a Comment