Have you ever bought clothing, or anything else for that matter, from a catalog (after carefully scrutinizing the image, of course) and upon receiving it, you were surprised by the product's actual color? The most likely answer to this questions is, "of course!"
It is probably only a slight exaggeration to say that this has happened at least once to everyone who has ordered anything ever.
As common as this problem is, however, there are ways to reduce the sometimes stark differences between catalog images and the actual products. Lorraine Press can help vendors and catalog designers depict products more accurately in their printed catalogs.
We can work with your color swatches, product samples, or even fabrics, and we will create the best CMYK match for the swatch color. With the color separations we create, you'll be able to design and print your catalog, confident that it will represent your products better than ever before.
Contact us for more information, or if you would like help in creating your most accurate catalog to date.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
Spot colors, Custom colors, Brand colors, and Pantone Colors
All these are names for the same type of thing: an ink that requires its own plate in the printing process. This ink color could be in addition to any or all of the usual four C, M, Y, and K inks used in the printing process, or it could be used all by itself.
Spot color inks are useful for several reasons: for producing a color not within the CMYK color gamut, maintaining a color specific to a certain brand or product (think Tiffany's, 3M, UPS, Coke, what colors do these companies bring to mind? Those are their brand colors.) or even for shrinking costs when only one or two colors (instead of four or five) can be used to produce a project.
When submitting a project with a spot color, you can identify that spot color several different ways to your printer:
For this reason, the Pantone color guide book (the actual physical book) is useful for picking your colors even though most graphic design programs have digital color books available. It is also nice to see what the actual Pantone color will look like as opposed to what is on the screen. But since the last time we bought the full range of color books from Pantone, they came in their own little suitcase, there may be financial considerations before you buy every kind of color from Pantone.
The color book does have a handy feature. If the Pantone color is achievable in CMYK, then a four-dot icon is underneath the color name. Like this picture demonstrates here:
We have put together a list of helpful hints about spot colors. Please read through this list for helpful suggestions on what to do with your spot color project before you submit it to your printer:
Spot color inks are useful for several reasons: for producing a color not within the CMYK color gamut, maintaining a color specific to a certain brand or product (think Tiffany's, 3M, UPS, Coke, what colors do these companies bring to mind? Those are their brand colors.) or even for shrinking costs when only one or two colors (instead of four or five) can be used to produce a project.
When submitting a project with a spot color, you can identify that spot color several different ways to your printer:
- with a physical sample of that color, (but sometimes the physical sample doesn't fit in your car to bring it to the print shop)
- with numerical values in a specified color space, such as CMYK, or Lab (but these numbers are all different depending on what color space they are in, so identify which color space you are using.)
- with an ink formula or recipe to mix the color, (not a usual way, but certainly possible)
- or most likely, with a color chip or a name from a color book, with the most popular color book in the U.S. being produced by Pantone. (Pantone colors are in many graphic design programs already!)
For this reason, the Pantone color guide book (the actual physical book) is useful for picking your colors even though most graphic design programs have digital color books available. It is also nice to see what the actual Pantone color will look like as opposed to what is on the screen. But since the last time we bought the full range of color books from Pantone, they came in their own little suitcase, there may be financial considerations before you buy every kind of color from Pantone.
The color book does have a handy feature. If the Pantone color is achievable in CMYK, then a four-dot icon is underneath the color name. Like this picture demonstrates here:
We have put together a list of helpful hints about spot colors. Please read through this list for helpful suggestions on what to do with your spot color project before you submit it to your printer:
- Tell your printer which spot color you want. You can use any of the methods described above, but make sure it gets said. Out loud or written down. It may sound silly to spell this out, but sometimes people forget to tell their printer, "There's a spot color on this job."
- Make certain that the spot color is named the exact same thing across programs. If in Illustrator you use "PANTONE 123C," and in InDesign you use "Pantone 123C" and then place that Illustrator file in InDesign, your final file will have two spot colors. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but without care, the number of spot colors in a project can multiply as quickly as tribbles. (I think the current record at Lorraine Press is well over 200 spot colors used in one document that was only supposed to have 1 spot color.)
- Double check in all programs used for your project that your spot color is defined as a spot color and not as a process color. The objects using the color marked process, even with the same name as your spot color, will come out on the CMYK plates and not the spot color plate. Once again, this sounds pretty basic, but it has caused headaches for people in the past.
- If there is an exact color, or an acceptable range of hues for that exact color that the printer absolutely needs to match or be constrained to, make certain that a physical sample of that exact color along with any acceptable shade tolerances is in the printer's possession, preferably before the job proofs, and especially before the job gets to the press. Nobody, you or the press operator, wants a surprise at the press check.
- If the printed piece is going to be subjected to heat, (for example be laminated), after printing, ask about possible color shifts with your spot color. If you are concerned about color shifts, ask for a laminated sample before moving forward with that color.
- If you are using a spot color and an aqueous coating in your project, be aware that with some spot colors in the blue, violet, and purple ranges, coatings will cause unacceptable visual color shifts after drying. Therefore, your ink manufacturer, or printer, may substitute pigments in your color which will not shift with applied coatings. And those pigments may not be an exact match for the original specified color. Check with your printer before printing to alleviate any concerns in this area.
- Double check your project to make sure that all the objects that should be using your spot color are actually using your spot color and not a process color similar to your spot color. This has tripped up customers in the past. One way to check this if you have a pdf of your project is in Adobe Acrobat (not Reader). It has a handy feature called Output Preview which will let you check your pdf for your spot color. (With recent versions of Acrobat: go to Advanced, then Print Production, then Output Preview. It will bring up a menu that lets you turn on and off your color separations. It will also show you if you have the correct number of spot colors in your pdf.)
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Pantone's Color of the Year
Tired of slushy, gray winter days? Pantone has a solution for you:
This is bright and vibrant pink is Pantone's new color of the year for 2011. They are recommending it for use in fashion, home decor, and in your wallet. A Pantone Visa Card is available in the color of the year:
Also available for download on the Pantone website are sample color palettes which use honeysuckle with coordinating colors. There's no end to the bubblegum pink possibilities!
“In times of stress, we need something to lift our spirits. Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues,” explains Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “Honeysuckle derives its positive qualities from a powerful bond to its mother color red, the most physical, viscerally alive hue in the spectrum.” For Pantone's press release on its color of the year, click here.
Can't get enough of Pantone's colors? Well, on your next jaunt to Belgium be sure to stop by the Pantone Hotel.
The "hotel of colors" uses color in its room design to evoke certain emotions like "vibrant," "cheerful," or "daring." Plus, a color consultant is available to help you choose the best color for your brand. And don't forget while you are there to stop by the Pantone Lounge, where you can choose between drinks named Pink Champagne PANTONE 12-1107, Lemon Drop PANTONE 12-0736 or Daiquiri Green 12-0435.
Not sure that pink is your thing, and you don't have a trip planned to Belgium anytime soon? That's okay, you can still request any Pantone color with your print order at Lorraine Press. We custom mix each color on-site in our ink lab with specific quality controls in place. Whether bubblegum pink or any other color, we'll make sure you are happy with how your color of the day turns out.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Stochastic vs. Conventional Screening
Being in the printing industry and scrutinizing the printing on sheets of paper for over a decade comes with some side effects. I can't look at any printed piece anywhere without noticing the quality of print job. Some things were so atrocious (to me) I wasn't sure how they made it out of the print shop's door: I've seen food labels missing the yellow from the image completely, book covers embossed out of register (so far out of register that I was dubious that they were really even aiming for the cover, but the person with me said, "What? I don't see anything wrong." Sigh.), double or upside-down signatures in books, print artifacts (hickies) so large that they blot out portions of the text, and calenders with a coating on it that won't accept ball point pen.
But recently I noticed a new side effect. I went shopping for tile for my bathroom remodel. Did you know that the ceramic tile made to look like stone is printed? I didn't. But on the display shelf in the store, there was a piece of tile that made me do a double-take. "Wait a minute!" I said, "This tile is completely out of register!" I wasn't even looking that closely. But after seeing that, you can believe I did. And after looking at ceramic tile for a couple of hours I knew that the conventional screening pattern in the tile, whether in register or not, would drive me crazy every single time I took a shower. There were no stochastic screened tiles at all!
You see, I am not used to seeing a pattern at all in the printing I work with. Lorraine Press uses stochastic screening in all of its offset printing, and I am converted to the benefits of stochastic screening over conventional. I don't like seeing a pattern of dots making up the images. After working with the tiny micron-sized spots of stochastic, the dots used in conventional screening seem large and extremely distracting to me. And there was no way I could look at that tile and not see the conventional pattern every time I washed my hair. (But my tile saga has a happy ending, I ended up with natural stone tile, and it's gorgeous!)
For me, this experience just highlighted the differences between stochastic screening techniques and conventional screening techniques. There has been much debate about the benefits and difficulties associated with stochastic screening technology–more appropriately termed Frequency Modulated, or FM screening. A great deal of information is available from all kinds of sources, some correct and well-researched and some very incorrect. The information here, in this blog post, comes from Lorraine Press's own experiences through our eighteen years of printing using stochastic screening.
When starting out, some people told us that stochastic screening had limited benefits and was too difficult to work with to be useful. But after careful investigation and testing, we chose to use only stochastic screening, and since then we've never looked back.
Though there was a small learning curve when we began using this technology, we already had the quality controls in place that guaranteed our printing and proofing processes would be able to reproduce stochastic screening. And in the eighteen years since implementing stochastic, we have not experienced any problem that would undermine the many benefits that this technology provides. Lorraine Press has always emphasized high quality results, and our expertise in stochastic printing gives our customers just one more reason to print with us.
What exactly is stochastic, or FM, screening and how is it different from conventional screening methods?
Simply put, stochastic screening creates the illusion of highlights and shadows with extremely tiny, randomly placed spots. More spots create shadows, fewer create highlights. The "random" nature of the spots eliminates the possibility of moiré and other conventional screening artifacts. And the small size of the spots allows greater detail in the reproduction of images and an appearance closer to the original continuous tone image. Conventional screening creates the illusion of highlight and shadow by altering the size of uniformly spaced dots, larger dots for shadow areas, and smaller dots for highlight areas. These dots, because of their uniformity, can create artifacts in printing.
Here is one of our sample images we've printed using both stochastic and conventional screening techniques.
And below are side-by-side comparisons of that same test image, viewed under a microscope, printed in the stochastic screening which we use at Lorraine Press and in the conventional screening technology that has been used in offset printing for many years. Stochastic is on the left, conventional is on the right.
Here is a sample of four-color screened type, left side being stochastic, and the right side conventional screening:
These photographs demonstrate the superior results achieved at Lorraine Press with stochastic screening. However, in our experience, most people don't look at our printed pieces under a loupe or microscope. But when handed two samples of the same product on the same paper but one is printed in stochastic and one in conventional and asked which one they liked better, invariably people chose the stochastic sample. So all those microscopic details shown above may not be what your end-user sees, but those details and clean lines add up to a finer quality product overall, and they will see that.
Here is a list of some other benefits of stochastic screening:
In summary, stochastic screening at Lorraine Press provides a more photo-realistic reproduction of continuous tone images, smoother screen builds, and sharper fine line and type simulations, while eliminating subject moiré and other objectionable artifacts. If you would like additional information on stochastic screening, or to see more samples printed in stochastic, feel free to contact us at Lorraine Press.
But recently I noticed a new side effect. I went shopping for tile for my bathroom remodel. Did you know that the ceramic tile made to look like stone is printed? I didn't. But on the display shelf in the store, there was a piece of tile that made me do a double-take. "Wait a minute!" I said, "This tile is completely out of register!" I wasn't even looking that closely. But after seeing that, you can believe I did. And after looking at ceramic tile for a couple of hours I knew that the conventional screening pattern in the tile, whether in register or not, would drive me crazy every single time I took a shower. There were no stochastic screened tiles at all!
You see, I am not used to seeing a pattern at all in the printing I work with. Lorraine Press uses stochastic screening in all of its offset printing, and I am converted to the benefits of stochastic screening over conventional. I don't like seeing a pattern of dots making up the images. After working with the tiny micron-sized spots of stochastic, the dots used in conventional screening seem large and extremely distracting to me. And there was no way I could look at that tile and not see the conventional pattern every time I washed my hair. (But my tile saga has a happy ending, I ended up with natural stone tile, and it's gorgeous!)
For me, this experience just highlighted the differences between stochastic screening techniques and conventional screening techniques. There has been much debate about the benefits and difficulties associated with stochastic screening technology–more appropriately termed Frequency Modulated, or FM screening. A great deal of information is available from all kinds of sources, some correct and well-researched and some very incorrect. The information here, in this blog post, comes from Lorraine Press's own experiences through our eighteen years of printing using stochastic screening.
When starting out, some people told us that stochastic screening had limited benefits and was too difficult to work with to be useful. But after careful investigation and testing, we chose to use only stochastic screening, and since then we've never looked back.
Though there was a small learning curve when we began using this technology, we already had the quality controls in place that guaranteed our printing and proofing processes would be able to reproduce stochastic screening. And in the eighteen years since implementing stochastic, we have not experienced any problem that would undermine the many benefits that this technology provides. Lorraine Press has always emphasized high quality results, and our expertise in stochastic printing gives our customers just one more reason to print with us.
What exactly is stochastic, or FM, screening and how is it different from conventional screening methods?
Simply put, stochastic screening creates the illusion of highlights and shadows with extremely tiny, randomly placed spots. More spots create shadows, fewer create highlights. The "random" nature of the spots eliminates the possibility of moiré and other conventional screening artifacts. And the small size of the spots allows greater detail in the reproduction of images and an appearance closer to the original continuous tone image. Conventional screening creates the illusion of highlight and shadow by altering the size of uniformly spaced dots, larger dots for shadow areas, and smaller dots for highlight areas. These dots, because of their uniformity, can create artifacts in printing.
Here is one of our sample images we've printed using both stochastic and conventional screening techniques.
And below are side-by-side comparisons of that same test image, viewed under a microscope, printed in the stochastic screening which we use at Lorraine Press and in the conventional screening technology that has been used in offset printing for many years. Stochastic is on the left, conventional is on the right.
Here is a sample of four-color screened type, left side being stochastic, and the right side conventional screening:
These photographs demonstrate the superior results achieved at Lorraine Press with stochastic screening. However, in our experience, most people don't look at our printed pieces under a loupe or microscope. But when handed two samples of the same product on the same paper but one is printed in stochastic and one in conventional and asked which one they liked better, invariably people chose the stochastic sample. So all those microscopic details shown above may not be what your end-user sees, but those details and clean lines add up to a finer quality product overall, and they will see that.
Here is a list of some other benefits of stochastic screening:
- four-color process simulations of spot colors have the appearance and texture of an actual spot color and don't have visible screen patterns like they do in conventional,
- gradients can be reproduced with smoother transitions from light to dark without hue shifts and the lightest shades of the gradient print,
- fine type and curved or angled lines don't have stair-stepping, and lines remain the same width regardless of the angle they are set at,
- reversing type from screened areas is cleaner and shows more detail especially with a delicate serif font,
- shadows contain more detail in the darker areas,
- more details overall in photos even under a loupe or microscope, creating a more photo-realistic appearance,
- subject moiré issues and visible rosette issues are nonexistent,
- less ink is used to print on the page, therefore stochastic is more "green,"
- inkjet proofing also uses stochastic, so there are no surprises on press due to screening difficulties.
In summary, stochastic screening at Lorraine Press provides a more photo-realistic reproduction of continuous tone images, smoother screen builds, and sharper fine line and type simulations, while eliminating subject moiré and other objectionable artifacts. If you would like additional information on stochastic screening, or to see more samples printed in stochastic, feel free to contact us at Lorraine Press.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Two Book Recommendations
When I was out shopping recently, I was reminded that January is the month where everybody everywhere is selling the idea of self-help or self-improvement. So I thought I'd join in and recommend some self-help books for Photoshoppers.
(And to add a disclaimer, these recommendations are solely my personal opinion, and not necessarily the recommendations of Lorraine Press as a company! But to give my opinion some clout, I have read many Photoshop books.)
Out of the host of how-to books out there on Adobe Photoshop, there are two that I'd recommend to anyone who already owns the software and is comfortable using it and wants to learn more.
For those who own Photoshop CS5 (either on a PC or Mac), I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: A professional image editor's guide to the creative use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC by Martin Evening. It has 768 pages (in the paperback edition) of helpful advice, plus an accompanying DVD that shows how your new skills can be applied. Haven't upgraded to CS5? Don't worry there's help for you procrastinators: the same book except written for CS4 is available, too. This book is most helpful to people who already are used to the basics in Photoshop and are ready for nitty gritty details.
For those who own Photoshop Elements, don't despair! There's a self-improvement book I am recommending for you, too. I particularly enjoyed Scott Kelby's The Photoshop Elements 9 Book for Digital Photographers (also by Matt Kloskowski). The 456 page book is full of "how-to" tips and effective techniques for getting the results you want. Plus, he tells how to work around several features that are in CS5 but not in Elements 9. I believe he calls them "cheats." It's a practical, "here's how you do this effect" book.
Either one of these books can improve a person's Photoshop skills. And after simply reading through these books, I guarantee you will have learned at least one new trick that will stick with you for years. So, in one area at least, your self-improvement goals can be met early in the year with small physical effort and a tiny outlay of cash!
Happy Reading!
(And to add a disclaimer, these recommendations are solely my personal opinion, and not necessarily the recommendations of Lorraine Press as a company! But to give my opinion some clout, I have read many Photoshop books.)
Out of the host of how-to books out there on Adobe Photoshop, there are two that I'd recommend to anyone who already owns the software and is comfortable using it and wants to learn more.
For those who own Photoshop CS5 (either on a PC or Mac), I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers: A professional image editor's guide to the creative use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC by Martin Evening. It has 768 pages (in the paperback edition) of helpful advice, plus an accompanying DVD that shows how your new skills can be applied. Haven't upgraded to CS5? Don't worry there's help for you procrastinators: the same book except written for CS4 is available, too. This book is most helpful to people who already are used to the basics in Photoshop and are ready for nitty gritty details.
For those who own Photoshop Elements, don't despair! There's a self-improvement book I am recommending for you, too. I particularly enjoyed Scott Kelby's The Photoshop Elements 9 Book for Digital Photographers (also by Matt Kloskowski). The 456 page book is full of "how-to" tips and effective techniques for getting the results you want. Plus, he tells how to work around several features that are in CS5 but not in Elements 9. I believe he calls them "cheats." It's a practical, "here's how you do this effect" book.
Either one of these books can improve a person's Photoshop skills. And after simply reading through these books, I guarantee you will have learned at least one new trick that will stick with you for years. So, in one area at least, your self-improvement goals can be met early in the year with small physical effort and a tiny outlay of cash!
Happy Reading!
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
A New Year, A New Way to Organize
New Year's Greetings to All!
Have you made your resolutions yet? If you just can't decide what resolution or goal to set, maybe we can help with some suggestions.
Do you have a way to organize your files, so at any time, you can put your hands on that one specific picture or document? No? Then, why not resolve to learn (and then use) Adobe Bridge? This is a powerful media management tool that can help you browse through, locate, view, and sort many types of files. It is easy to learn to use, and an excellent way to manage your files, which can get out of hand really quickly. Plus, if you have ever bought a version of Creative Suite or any of several standalone Adobe programs, you probably already own it. So there's no extra cost to you at all!
It's has a completely customizable interface so the features you want are the ones most easily viewed, and it works with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and other program files.
I like the thumbnail preview features myself. The thumbnails are scalable, so if you need to see the details of an image, a sliding view bar allows you to grow the thumbnail until it fills the viewing area. Plus, when a photo or document is selected, various menus can give you all the information, including metadata, that you could possibly want to know about that file. Once selected, a particular file can also be labelled or rated. Then Bridge can sort the files to show only the photos or documents you have labelled or rated a certain way. Very handy when selecting a few photos from a photoshoot of hundreds.
Bridge CS5 can also quickly create PDF presentations. You can configure the final size of the presentation, the resolution quality, headers or footers, whether the file names show or not, page numbers, presentation playback options, and the addition of watermarks to your photos all with this one tool. To do this, select the images to be included in your PDF, or if you want all images in a folder, you don't have to select any. Then click on the Output Menu icon, and then Output to Web or PDF. Click on the PDF option, and configure your settings from there. Click "save" to create your PDF presentation. Easy!
It has many other features I have found useful, including opening RAW photos for editing (without launching Photoshop!), creating vector images with Illustrator's Live Trace, and batch processing groups of images.
Why not start off the new year with a plan to organize all those loose files? It can end up saving you time and money, leaving you free to work on your other new year's resolutions.
Have you made your resolutions yet? If you just can't decide what resolution or goal to set, maybe we can help with some suggestions.
Do you have a way to organize your files, so at any time, you can put your hands on that one specific picture or document? No? Then, why not resolve to learn (and then use) Adobe Bridge? This is a powerful media management tool that can help you browse through, locate, view, and sort many types of files. It is easy to learn to use, and an excellent way to manage your files, which can get out of hand really quickly. Plus, if you have ever bought a version of Creative Suite or any of several standalone Adobe programs, you probably already own it. So there's no extra cost to you at all!
It's has a completely customizable interface so the features you want are the ones most easily viewed, and it works with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and other program files.
I like the thumbnail preview features myself. The thumbnails are scalable, so if you need to see the details of an image, a sliding view bar allows you to grow the thumbnail until it fills the viewing area. Plus, when a photo or document is selected, various menus can give you all the information, including metadata, that you could possibly want to know about that file. Once selected, a particular file can also be labelled or rated. Then Bridge can sort the files to show only the photos or documents you have labelled or rated a certain way. Very handy when selecting a few photos from a photoshoot of hundreds.
Bridge CS5 can also quickly create PDF presentations. You can configure the final size of the presentation, the resolution quality, headers or footers, whether the file names show or not, page numbers, presentation playback options, and the addition of watermarks to your photos all with this one tool. To do this, select the images to be included in your PDF, or if you want all images in a folder, you don't have to select any. Then click on the Output Menu icon, and then Output to Web or PDF. Click on the PDF option, and configure your settings from there. Click "save" to create your PDF presentation. Easy!
It has many other features I have found useful, including opening RAW photos for editing (without launching Photoshop!), creating vector images with Illustrator's Live Trace, and batch processing groups of images.
Why not start off the new year with a plan to organize all those loose files? It can end up saving you time and money, leaving you free to work on your other new year's resolutions.
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