Our Full Colour Printing is produced on State-of-the KBA and Heidelberg Lithographic Printing Presses. The presses range in size from B3 (353mm X 500mm) right up to 1600mm x 1180mm!
The superior quality of these machines allows us to produce work of the very highest standard. Quality control at every stage of the production process is your assurance of complete satisfaction, ensuring that whatever your message it is powerfully delivered.
We are among the few printers to use
Stochastic Screening for all our Litho Printing. It means that traditional varying size dots are replaced with much smaller constant size dots randomly placed. The difference over ‘conventional’ screens is dramatic, with improvements in the quality of both pictures and fine text. Though the technology is not the same the difference is like comparing High Definition with Ordinary TV.
Full Colour Printing is produced by the combination of Four Colours – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (also known as Key explaining why the process is sometimes described as CMYK printing). The process involves separating each of the colours in the files in to their four colour components. The colour separation is known as colour screening and today this is generally a digital process. A separate Print Plate is made for each colour. We produce
RCS Swatch Books which contain many hundreds of swatches of colour each with the mix of CMYK inks used to produce them to assist in designing.
The image on the plates consists of a series of halftones, areas of solid and areas where there is no image at all. A halftone is made up of a number of tiny dots with white space between them. The heavier the halftone the greater is the concentration (or frequency) of dots and vice versa for lighter Halftones.
The process of Printing involves wetting the plate with water. The water ‘sticks’ to areas without image and does not stick to areas with image. Next ink is applied to the plate. The ink ‘sticks’ to the dry areas of plate, (i.e. the imaged areas). The image on the plate is then transferred (or offset) on to a rubber blanket. The image on the blanket then transfers to the paper or board as it passes through the press.
The reason the plate can be right reading (rather than all reversed as in original letter press machines) is that the image does not transfer directly to the paper. The image on the offset cylinder is reversed so that the image on the paper is right reading again.
In Full Colour Printing the image on each of the four plates is printed separately with the second overlaid on the first and so on. When the images on all four plates have been printed, the result is a reproduction of colour. The small dots on each individual plate come together to create a complete colour image, although the individual dots can still be seen with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass.
Digital Printing
The process of Digital Full Colour Printing uses an entirely different process to produce the ‘plates’. Instead of a hard image being rendered on to a physical printing plate the ‘image’ is laid down by charging a surface with a layer of electro static electricity. The image is then ‘written’ on to this layer by removing charge in a complex pattern equivalent to ‘dots’ on a lithographic plate. Once this has been done toner or liquid with magnetic properties is applied to the charged plate and ‘sticks’ according to the concentration of charge. The resulting image is then transfer to the paper. When all four colours have been laid down this way the finished image may need to be fused using heat to ‘stick’ it to the paper.
The great advantage of Digital Printing over Litho Printing is that there is no physical plate to be made. This means that every image can be different to the one before and the one after.
Four Colour Process Printing is a fantastically powerful way of creating colour and is used for the majority of print today. However it does have limitations because the
gamut of colours which can be produced is much more limited than the number of colours in the ‘natural world’.
In order to overcome this limitation there are other print techniques. These include
Spot Colour Printing, Hexachrome and Metal FX Printing.