The Truth About Commercial Printing

Commercial printing is all about those shiny marketing collaterals you use to entice your target readers to your business. In fact, commercial printing is all about creating a collage of beautiful colors that use halftone, spot colors, and process colors.

With new technology coming out everyday, using black and white for your printing jobs is not anymore beneficial if you want to attract more attention. With new technologies developing, it is a crime nowadays to produce your marketing collaterals minus the brilliance of color.

In order for you to get the best quality print job for your business, you need to understand commercial printing and how you can use it to help you grow your business. Here are a few concepts to help you understand the process better:

Halftones
Halftoning according to Wikipedia is generally used to reproduce your graphics and image via mechanical or electrical means that applies ‘continuous tone’. This can be done by utilizing dots with different sizes and then giving each of them equal space. The image that was produced is then referred to a ‘halftone’.

The difference that a halftone process makes particularly on visual reproductions is that binary images are printed using only one color ink. What makes this process special is that it utilizes optical illusion to achieve the smooth tones that we finally see in the completed output. The binary reproduction relies on the blending of the tiny halftone dots when seen using the human eye.

Color printing is then produced by repeating the halftone process using the CMYK scheme. With its ‘semi-opaque’ characteristic of ink, color printing can produce another optical effect of full-color images and graphics using halftone dots of varied colors.

Spot Color
In commercial printing, spot color refers to any color produced by a pure or mixed ink in a single run. It is basically made up of the CMYK spot color scheme- cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This method is called a four-color process. With more advanced color process such as the hex achromatic process, it usually applies six spot colors, including orange and green. Hence, instead of CMYK, you now have CMYKOG as your color inks.

Additional information: spot color is often used by most technicians of offset printing to refer to any color produced by non-standard offset ink- e.g. fluorescent inks, spot varnish, metallic inks, and even custom hand-mixed ones.

Process Color
Process color, on the other hand, is used to create the brilliance and vibrancy of shades in the images that we see in magazines and brochures. It is blending together both the halftone and spot color to produce the image that we want.

This method uses CMYK by concealing a part or entirety of certain colors against a white background. It absorbs specific wavelengths of light to ‘subtract’ from its brightness.