OUGD504: Design Production - What Is Design For Print? Content: Colour

COLOUR

noun

1.

the property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light.

"the lights flickered and changed colour"

synonyms: hue, shade, tint, tone, tinge, cast, tincture,

CONTENT

1. Colour Modes
2. Pantone Colour Match
3. How does colour effect print in terms of cost?
4. Terminology

COLOUR MODES

CYMK 

The CMYK color model (process color, four colour) is a subtractive color model, used in colour printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself.CMYK refers to the four inks used in some colour printing: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (black). Though it varies by print house, press operator, press manufacturer, and press run, ink is typically applied in the order of the abbreviation.

The "K" in CMYK stands for key because in four-color printing, cyan, magenta, and yellow printing plates are carefully keyed, or aligned, with the key of the black key plate.

RGB

The RGB color model is an additive color model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additive primary colours, red, green, and blue.

The main purpose of the RGB color model is for the sensing, representation, and display of images in electronic systems, such as televisions and computers, though it has also been used in conventional photography. Before the electronic age, the RGB color model already had a solid theory behind it, based in human perception of colours.

RGB is a device-dependent color model: different devices detect or reproduce a given RGB value differently, since the color elements (such as phosphors or dyes) and their response to the individual R, G, and B levels vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, or even in the same device over time. Thus an RGB value does not define the samecolor across devices without some kind of color management.

Halftone

Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size, in shape or in spacing. "Halftone" can also be used to refer specifically to the image that is produced by this process.

Where continuous tone imagery contains an infinite range of colours or greys, the halftone process reduces visual reproductions to an image that is printed with only one color of ink, in dots of differing size. This reproduction relies on a basic optical illusion—that these tiny halftone dots are blended into smooth tones by the human eye. At a microscopic level, developed black-and-white photographic film also consists of only two colors, and not an infinite range of continuous tones.

Duotone 

Duotone is a halftone reproduction of an image using the superimposition of one contrasting colour halftone (traditionally black) over another color halftone. This is most often used to bring out middle tones and highlights of an image. The most common colors used are blue, yellow, browns and reds.

Spot Colour

Spot colour refers to a method of specifying and printing colors in which each color is printed with its own ink. In contrast, process colour printing uses four inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to produce all other colors. Spot color printing is effective when the printed matter contains only one to three different colors, but it becomes prohibitively expensive for more colours.

PANTONE COLOUR MATCH

The Pantone Color Matching System is largely a standardized color reproduction system. By standardizing the colors, different manufacturers in different locations can all refer to the Pantone system to make sure colors match without direct contact with one another.

HOW DOES COLOUR EFFECT PRINT IN TERMS OF COST?

The CYMK, four colour printing process involves the use of four plates: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Keyline (Black). The CYMK artwork is separated into these four colours - one plate per colour. The four CYMK inks are applied one by one to four different rollers and the paper or card (stock) is then fed through the printing press. The colours are applied to the stock one by one and design comes out full colour, this would be more expensive than the two colour printing process which has a smaller colour range it only has two plates and two runs whereas the full colour printing process goes through the printing press four times.

TERMINOLOGY

Gamut - In colour reproduction, including computer graphics and photography, the gamut, or colour gamut, is a certain complete subset of colours.

PPI - Pixels per centimeter (ppcm), Pixels per inch (PPI) or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of devices in various contexts: typically computer displays, image scanners, and digital camera image sensors.

DPI - Dots per inch (DPI) is a measure of spatial printing or video dot density, in particular the number of individual dots that can be placed in a line within the span of 1 inch (2.54 cm).

Hue - Hue is one of the main properties of a color, defined technically, as "the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow". 

Saturation - The vividness or purity of a colour. The less gray a colour contains, the more saturated it is.

Brightness - rightness is an attribute of our perception which is mainly influenced by a color's lightness. This is probably why brightness and lightness are often mixed up. Brightness is not a color property, if used "correctly".

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