What is spot color printing?
When packaging printing or book printing, spot color printing process is often used to print a large area of background color. Spot color refers to the color printed with color inks that are pre-mixed and specially formulated by the printing plant. The color inks other than the four color inks of yellow, magenta, cyan and black are used to replicate the color of the original. .
In current printing, in addition to the common four-color printing, there are six-color, eight-color or even more color printing. Four-color printing is not easy to achieve the ideal reproduction effect due to control problems such as overprinting and ink balance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary to use some spot color printing. Spot color printing can print colors that cannot be printed by the usual four-color process or colors that are not easy to print. The printing factory obtains the color blended by the spot color according to the principle of color reduction and color mixing. The lightness of the ink color will be lower, and the saturation will be higher. The method of solid printing is the usual method to make the ink color uniform, and then appropriate Increase the ink volume. When the thickness of the ink layer on the layout becomes larger, the change of the ink layer thickness will be less sensitive to color changes, so it is easier to get a uniform and thick printing effect.
Each spot color has its own fixed hue, which can ensure the accuracy of printing color reproduction and solve the problem of inaccurate color reproduction caused by poor ink superposition in offset printing. Moreover, the same spot color can maintain the same hue no matter where it is printed, avoiding the color deviation caused by the printing environment, equipment, and technology. If summed up in a very simple sentence, the spot color is actually a color blended with two inks or more than two inks.
Except for the four basic inks of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, all other inks are collectively referred to as spot color inks. If there are colorful pictures and texts on a picture album, and there are silver signs, then this silver is a kind of spot color.
Under normal circumstances, the printing process of spot color and four-color is the same, and they have to go through filming, printing, and printing, and the materials and machines used are no different. After cleaning, it can be used to print spot colors, and the spot color printing plates can still be printed in magenta if they are placed in a magenta unit.
