Before you begin designing a printing project, you would want to discuss with your printing professional whether to use process color that are used in commercial printing to produce color photographic images and a wide range of solid colors also known as CMYK color, or spot color.

Microsoft Publisher supports process-color and spot-color printing and provides all the tools your commercial printing service needs to prepare your color publication for printing. After you make a decision about color, you can design your print job for the type of color printing you have chosen.
Choosing process-color and spot-color printing.

In most cases, your decision to use process color, spot color, or a combination of spot and process color will be based on the printing issues that you discuss with someone from a commercial printing service.

The issues include the following:

1. The number or range of colors that will best suit you.

Spot color printing uses percentages, or tints, of one or more colors. Spot colors are typically used in print jobs to:

• Emphasize headings, borders, and logos.

• Match colors in line drawings or other simple graphics.

• Specify special inks, such as metallic or varnish.

• Print black and white photographs.

Process-color (CMYK) printing, which can reproduce all colors on the printed page, is often used when a publication:

• Includes full-color photographs.

• Uses detailed, multicolored graphics.

In some cases, you may need to combine both spot colors and process colors, which will require five or more ink plates. Combined spot-color and process-color printing is typically used when:

• You need to print color photographs together with a commercial logo whose color cannot be recreated using process-color inks.

• One of the colors in your publication is a metallic color ink.

• You need to apply a clear varnish over a process-color publication.

2. The cost of producing the print job.

Typically, a process-color is more expensive to produce than a spot-color publication. If you are printing only a small number, the cost per copy may be prohibitive. However, if your print job uses a wide range of colors or includes color photos, process-color printing is your best choice.

Spot color costs have a wide range, but they are flexible. A spot color job requires a separate ink plate for every color, but you can get the look of multiple colors using only one or two inks.

The cost of producing a publication also depends on the type of paper used for printing, the complexity of the print job's graphics, and the number that will be produced.


For comments and inquiries about the article visit http://www.colorprintingwholesale.com





About author:

Florie Lyn Masarate got the flair for reading and writing when she got her first subscription of the school newsletter in kindergarten. She had her first article published on that same newsletter in the third grade.