Color Management for commercial print

Color Management for commercial print

Correct use of colour for desired outcomes, using the CMYK mode for print(subtractive colour, ink on paper)  RGB for screen based output (additive colour, mixtures of light. 

CMYK often referred to Process Colour. 

Commercial Printing comes under many forms, the most common been:

Offset Lithography 

Digital Printing

Screen Printing 

When thinking about the use of colour through the computer, consider the ink output. 

Swatches & Global colors to change used colours efficiently. 

Different tints can then be taken from these initial swatches. 

 

Discuss with external printer the colour libarys they use, generally Pantone library but its important to know what the printer uses before you start using colour books and making swatches.

  

Can create spot colours from these pantone swatches. 

Dot within white triangle shows spot colours.

Save swatch Libraries for use in other applications to keep colour reproduction consistent, and to supply to printers so they know what swatches have been used. 

Then these swatch libraries can be transferred to other adobe programs.

Process colours

A process colour is printed using a combination of the four process inks; cyan, magenta, yellow and black. By default, illustrator creates new swatches as process colours.

Global swatches 

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