4-Color Process vs. Spot Color Printing
When you create printed products such as promotional items, chances are that you’ll use either 4-color process or spot color printing. Both processes are popular because they produce high quality items while keeping the price quite reasonable.
These two types of printing produce markedly different results, so it’s typically very easy to tell which process was used simply by looking at the colors within a printed design.
Here’s a brief description of each process that also explains how they differ from one another.
4-Color Process Printing
Open up your Sunday newspaper and find the funny pages. If you look very closely at a full-color comic strip, you’ll see that the images are made up of tiny colored dots. There are only four different colors of dots, but together they create a wide spectrum of hues. This is four-color process printing at work. It’s the same principle upon which your home printer operates; commercial printers use an advanced form of the process that produces very high-quality images.
This process is also called CMYK color printing, after the four colors of ink it utilizes: cyan (C), yellow (Y), magenta (M), and black, also known as key (K). These four colors can produce nearly any color imaginable, including gradients and subtle blends. Each color is applied to the surface one-at-a-time in a layered fashion using four different printing plates. Note that since the inks are blended and printed at the same time, you might get very slight variations in color with each printing.
Four color process is generally more expensive than spot printing, but it’s the method of choice when printing detailed color photography or extremely detailed illustrations that contain four or more colors.
Spot Color Printing
Instead of creating hues by blending inks during the printing process, spot color printing transfers solid fields of pre-mixed ink directly to the page or object. This means that the color will remain exactly the same with every print run.
Since they can’t achieve the same level of color variety as economically as four-color process, spot color designs contain only a limited number of colors (typically between one and three), each applied separately to the desired surface.
Many spot color inks are standardized using PMS (Pantone Matching System). PMS assigns a number to each of over a thousand different hues so that commercial printers can easily print a design in your color of choice. Even though PMS color inks are pre-mixed, their number is so enormous that nearly any color you want can be “matched” with a practically equivalent ink.
Images created using spot color printing tend to be bright and vibrant, but are limited in their use of color (although subtle effects such as gradients can be achieved by adjusting the opacity of design elements). The spot color process is also less expensive, making it a very popular choice for printing logos, text, and simple illustrations.
When weighing the pros and cons of 4-color process vs. spot color printing, consider how much color variety you require in your design. If expense is an issue, then it might be best to choose spot color process; this could mean tweaking a logo so that it only uses three or fewer spot colors. Some, on the other hand, will prefer the flexibility that 4-color process provides. Stick with whichever process is best suited for your design.
Posted in Printing Technology