All About Digital Printing - About Offset Printing
Digital printing burst onto the market some years ago now, first plagued by banding and poor image quality this is now a distant memory, and has become integral to the business needing short run, or printing in a hurry. Digital printing is the reproduction of digital images on physical surfaces, some of these surfaces include common paper stock, photographic paper, film, cloth and even plastic material.
Digital printing serves a different market in most cases than the offset printer, catering for one off's, or short runs the digital printer is perfect for small business. Digital printing also is perfect for small runs of posters, pole posters, flyers or short run sales material such as brochures, or point of sale merchandise.
Digital printing can be differentiated from offset printing in a few ways, some of these differences are as follows. Unlike the offset printer a digital print can have a different image on every print done, hence why it is perfect for small print runs. The ink or toner as it is called does not absorb into the paper, as does conventional ink, but forms a layer on the surface of what is being printed. In most cases the digital printer requires less waste in terms of chemicals used and also less paper is wasted in the initial set up of the digital printer.
Digital printing is the perfect choice for fast prototyping, or small print runs which in turn means the technology is far more acceptable by a range of designers. WEBRAND print with both offset printers and digital printers, this in turn allows us to cater to any kind of print job no matter what your requirements may be.
Colour Printing Guidelines
Some colours may not meet your expectation.
While we make every effort to print your digital artwork as accurately
as we can, sometimes issues outside our control mean that the colour
print may not be exactly as you expect.
CMYK and RGB and what it means to your printing
Toner Colours - Colour printers use a combination of
Cyan, Yellow, Magenta & Black (CMYK) toner to create colours. If
your file uses CMYK to create your colour you will get a good result.
Screen Colours - All computer screens use a
combination of Red, Green & Blue (RGB) to create colours. If your
file uses RGB it has to be converted to CMYK when the file is printed
as colour printers use a combination of CMYK toner to create colours.
This process can cause the colour to shift and may give an
unsatisfactory result.
Software - Software controls the mixing of colours
and some software is more suitable for colour control than others. If
you want greater control over colour you must use software that you can
reproduce in CMYK such as Indesign, QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop
or CorelDraw.
Microsoft Word, PowerPoint & Excel have limited
control over colour and should not be used when colour is critical.
What you can do
- Tell us what software program has been used to create the file.
- Let us know before we print the job how critical the colour accuracy is.
What we can do
- Our graphic designer can design the job for you using the most appropriate software.
- Provide you a colour proof for sign off prior to printing.
- Advise you of the cost and time to manually convert an RGB file to CMYK.
You can read about offset printing by following this link , if you are needing templates for Illustrator we have put a few together for download you can find them also by following the linked text. If you are sending in your own artwork please read our artwork specifications to make sure it is rign the first time.
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Saturday, November 22, 2008
