Print Guide

CMYK

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black). These are the primary colours printers use to create the whole colour spectrum. This can also be referred to as full colour or four colour. It is important that any image within your print document are supplied as CMYK. Most photo/picture editing programs today have the editing capabilities to convert images to CMYK.

Here is an example of how CMYK works.

These colours are all 100% screen.

What is a Screen

A offset screen is a series of microscopic dots, and If you look at a newspaper or magazine with a magnifying glass you will be able to see these dots. The depth of the colour depends on how close together the dots are. The closer together the stronger the colour, further apart the weaker the colour.

This is a simple example of a black screen.

Colour Screens

This is where we use screens of CMYK to gain the full colour spectrum. Here is an example of how we use screen percentages of CMYK to gain a desired colour, in this instance we would like to create a purple.

PMS Colours

Pantone Matching System or PMS colours are premixed inks for clients who require a perfect consistency with their print requirements. These colours are effectively the same as a paint you would buy from a hardware store. Generally large national & international companies use Pantone colours for their logo’s because they will use different printers depending on location and cost requirements. You would be able to compare the same job printed by two different printers, and they should match perfectly when PMS colours are used.
However the use of Pantone colours generally come at a higher cost to the client.

Bleed

All printers will require that you supply your print files with bleed included. Bleed is where an image or colour on the page needs to extend all the way to the edge of the paper. Printers generally can’t actually print to the very edge of the paper, so instead they print on a larger sheet of paper and then trim it down to the correct size. If you don’t supply a document with bleed you run the risk of receiving a printed job with a 1mm to 2mm white border surrounding the edges of the page. Here at the Inkspot we require 3mm bleed around the supplied document.

Crop Marks

Crop marks, also known as trim marks, are lines printed in the corners of your publication’s sheet or sheets of paper to show the printer where to trim the paper, and crop marks are used to define where to trim.