What printers and brand owners must know about spot colors

What printers and brand owners must know about spot colors

Spot colors and their characteristics

Spot color ink refers to a specific color ink that is pre-mixed, such as fluorescent yellow, pearl blue, metallic silver ink, etc. It is not mixed by CMYK four colors. Over-color means accurate color. It has the following four characteristics:

1. Accuracy

Each color register has its own fixed hue, so it can ensure the accuracy of the color in printing, thus solving the problem of the accuracy of color transfer to a large extent

2. On-the-ground

Spot colors are generally defined by a solid color, no matter how light the color is. Of course, the spot color can also be screened to present any shade of the spot color;

3. Opacity

Spot color ink is a kind of covering ink, it is opaque and can cover solid;

4. Wide color gamut

The color gamut in the chromatographic library is very wide, exceeding the RGB performance gamut, not to mention the CMYK color space, so a large part of the colors cannot be presented with CMYK four-color inks.

Reasons for choosing spot colors in color dot printing

In color dot printing, the characteristics of spot color inks are often used to select and use them. Generally speaking, it is generally used in two situations:

1. In order to print some visible light colors other than CMYK four-color printing ink on the printed matter

The color gamut of CMYK four-color printing ink is obviously insufficient compared with that of visible light, while the color gamut of spot color ink is wider than that of CMYK four-color printing ink, so it can express many colors other than CMYK four-color ink.

2. To make up for the shortcomings of printing technology

    Due to the errors of each process in the overall printing process, equipment maintenance, operating environment, perceived omissions and mechanical wear and other problems, it is difficult to obtain a flat and uniform dot color when printing small dots below 153. At this time, we can use the same color. The full-page color registration (ie spot color solid) replaces the small dots for printing, and it is easier to obtain a flat large-area color block. In addition, sometimes in order to clearly express fine drawings, such as mixed-color graphics or anti-white lines of thinner strokes, spot color processing is often used to ensure that fine lines can be rendered realistic and delicate enough.

Some problems that should be paid attention to when using spot color before printing

1. Unification of spot color names

In different software, the names of the two identical sets of colors may be different. For example, FreeHand named PANTONGEI1F as PANTONE1F5CVC or PANIONE1F5CVV, while in PageMaker it was named PANTONE1F5CV. In this way, when the FreeHand graphic object is placed in PageMaker for typesetting, the same color will have three names, and three printing plates will be generated when the color separation is output, resulting in output errors. Therefore, if the data file needs to be used in more than two kinds of software, before the integrated color separation output, be sure to pay attention: the use names of the same spot color must be unified. The more common method is to take the color name in the hair row as the criterion, and rename the same spot color name to a unified name in the palette of various software.