The Truth about Commercial Printing

Full-color brochures; bright, brilliant posters; beautiful photographs on a flyer – they’re all nice to look at. The colors look so radiant and pleasing to the eye. But the colors in these printed items are actually an optical illusion – they’re really a combination of halftoning, spot colors and process colors.

Full-color commercial printing is a booming business as companies vie for customers through awesome photographs, colorful text and vibrant logos. To use these techniques it helps if you know how the optical illusion of color printing works. Here’s the scoop:

Halftones

Halftone is a graphical reproduction technique that resembles a complete image through the use of equally spaced dots of various sizes. The image is a binary image, meaning it’s made dots that are only one color, generally black. This reproduction process relies on an optical illusion – your eyes will automatically see all the dots as one continuous color – your mind “connects the dots,” if you will. Each pixel of a halftone is smaller than the eye can process, so when your eyes see all these little dots together, they get blended into one color. This process was created by William Fox Talbot in the early 1850s. Halftones depend on distance to work – if you’re close to a halftone, you’ll see the dots and your mind will register them because the dots are bigger the closer you are to the image. The farther away you get from the halftone, the more your brain puts the dots together to create an image. Newspapers use halftone printing in their photographs – look closely at a newspaper photo under a magnifying glass and you’ll see the dots!

Spot Colors

Spot colors are non-mixed colors (mixed colors are known as process colors, see the next section). Spot colors are applied to paper by putting the same page through a press multiple times with a different color of ink applied each time. The colors are separated so that whatever item being colored, like the headline, will be the only element printed with the colored ink while the text will be printed in black the next go ‘round. Spot colors are used when you just need one or two colors in your entire document.

Process Colors

Process colors are used for photographs and other images that use a broad spectrum of colors. It is a combination of the halftone and spot color effects. Apparent colors are produced through blending cyan, magenta, yellow and black (also known as CMYK printing). These blended colored dots are too small for the eye to distinguish and are situated next to each other which make them seem like a combined color. The dots are not placed directly on top of each other – they all overlap to produce the color your eye sees.

So when you see a photograph in a newspaper or magazine, whether it’s in color or not, take a closer look – you’ll see that you’re really just looking at a series of dots that your mind has melded into a continuous image.

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