Digital Print Workshop 1

Commercial Print; Offset Lithography / Digital Printing / Screen Printing
Important to have knowledge in digital print and colours so you can avoid shifts in colour when using digital print, otherwise it's a waste of time and money.

Digital Colour Modes
CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow & black)
subtractive colour, ink on paper

RGB (red, green and blue)
additive colour, light via monitor, projector etc

CMYK is used to define colour as it is when created during the printing process
Sometimes referred to as Process Colour

CMYK colour is made during the print process
they are printed on top of each other, creating a range of colours

Each ink is applied one at a time. When inks mix on the paper, different tones appear and other colours are created. The cyan and yellow are printed first then the magenta is printed and then the black.
K = key colour. The last one printed, it keys all the other inks together finishing off the job.

We need to think of Colour as Ink

Illustrator
swatch palette - consistently & efficiency - you can apply the same exact colour again and again
registration colour is used for printers marks. - trim marks etc
shouldn't use unless we want to add our own printers marks around our layout/artwork
Creating Colour Swatches
Go to the colour tab on the top right and right click the corner. Select create new swatch

 When creating swatches they appear in the swatches menu.

Global Swatches
Link between swatch and any artwork the swatch is applied to. This means that when the original swatch has been edited the pieces of work using the swatch automatically update as well.

Double clicking a swatch enables you to edit it. As the swatch is global I can edit it and then it will change the shapes colour the swatch is used on. Orange turned into green 

Creating tints
When moving the swatches tab out from the rest you can use the gradient bar to create tints.
Once you have selected a particular percentage of tint you can click on the new swatch icon at the botto of the swatches tab and a new swatch will be created.

Spot Colour
Each time an ink is applied there is a significant cost
Printing with one ink is much cheaper and efficient
Efficient for branding as its the exact right colour. A particular colour will always be referenced.
e.g. - Sainsbury's use a spot colour. They reference that orange with a particular spot colour.
Metallic inks cannot be printed with CMYK, as they are unique spot colours.

How do we access Spot colours in Illustrator?
Open swatch Library > Color Books > Pantone + Solid Coated

Don't change name of spot colour
has to be identified by its unique reference number otherwise the printer wont recognise which colour to print.

You can use a search bar in the pantone swatches to search for a particular swatch you want and when clicking on them to be added to your swatch menu, the spot colour has a tiny dot in the triangle that on the orange icon.

Saving Swatches

Once the swatches are saved you can look in the swatch libraries and find the swatches you saved on the menu, under the 'User Defined' tab.

When saving your swatches to be used in photoshop and Indesign you select 'save swatch library as ASE'.

Tints, patterns and gradients wont load into InDesign!

Global colours
A global colour is automatically updated through your artwork when you edit it. All spot colours are global; however, process colours can be either global or local. You can identity global colour swatches by the global colour icon (when he panel is in list view) or a triangle in the lower corner (when the panel is in thumbnail view)

Spot colours
A spot colour is an ink that is used instead of, or in addition to, CMYK process inks. You can identity spot colour swatches by the spot colour icon (when the panel is list view) or a dot in the lower corner (when the panel is in thumbnail view)