Printing Basics

Offset lithography is a process that uses a combination of four process colours, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, generally noted as CMYK, to produce full-colour images.

As previously mentioned, both Illustrator and InDesign default to plain black, where it’s more often recommended you do your type setting for documents anyway. If, however, something happens where you’ve accidentally set especially large amounts of type in any variant of rich black, you might notice a problem in your final printed piece. If your press operator runs your job and doesn’t perfectly match up each separation of CMYK by precisely lining up the document’s registration marks, or if the paper shifts at all while moving through the rollers on press, you’ll likely see ghosting of one or all of C, M, or Y falling outside of the characters in your type, making it not nearly as sharp as expected. Your printer might end up doing it well regardless, but it also might take them more time, paper, and energy to print it correctly.

If you’d like any/all of your image(s) to run completely to the edges of your final printed piece, you’ll have to include what’s referred to as bleed on all edges of your documents.

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Although these might be the basics, they’re also the problems that prepress operators most often face when preparing files for printing. The best way to avoid […]

ISO paper sizes Japanese B-series paper sizes