- hey, everyone. i'm sitting on the floor so that i can try a slightlydifferent lighting setup, so hopefully i'm well lit. this video was goingto be color theory two,
where can i get color copies printed, except that when i waswriting it out loud, it kind of stoppedbeing about color theory and started being more about pre-press production for printing,
which is a completely different subject from rgb color processes and what i talked about in my last video. keep on watching because it's... nah, i'll let jason monday sing it to you. ♫ keep on watching ♫ it's time for karen kavett now ♫ so, cmyk. cmyk stands for cyan,magenta, yellow, and key.
not black, which is acommon misconception. it's called this because the cyan, magenta, and yellow printing plates are all aligned againstthe key black plate. basically when you make a large run of printed material youhave a different plate for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. i put a link in the description to a short video that showsa printing press in action,
so if you go watch that maybe it'll make a little more sense. if you remember from my last video, the cmyk color model is subtractive. since you begin with a white surface and you subtract brightness from it, once you start putting ink down. if you look really closely at a magazine or some other massproduced printed material,
you'll notice that the imagery is made up of tiny little cyan, magenta,yellow, and black dots. this is called halftone printing and since ink is semi-transparent, when you start layering thosecolors on top of each other, they make the fullspectrum of the rainbow. when you're printing,you want to make sure that you always set yourimages to be cmyk and not rgb. let's say you're trying to print
this lovely photo of michael buckley. the screen can render those bright reds and greens beautifully, but a printer isn't going to be able to. colors look completely different in print than they do on the screen, and it's better to find that out early or else you're in for avery unpleasant surprise. when you're preparing documents for print,
you want to be aware of yourbleed area and your trim line. the trim line is where the printer is going to cut the paper. but if you want the image to go all the way tothe edge of the paper, you'll have to leave a bleedof 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch. that way if the paperends up shifting a little, the image won't just stop, leaving you with a really ugly white line
on the edge of your paper. you'll also have to leave a bleed if you're planning onhaving your project die cut, which it when it's cut intoa fancy shape by a machine. this yule ball invitation from the harry potter film wizardry book is an example of somepretty intricate die cuts. let's talk about dpi. dpi stands for dots per inch,
and it's basically how many pixels are printed on each inch of the paper. images saved for theweb are usually 72 dpi, but if you're printing a book or a poster, it'll only need to besomewhere around 300. this is why if you find asmall image off the internet and you try to print it, it'll come out really pixelated, because the pixel information you need
for a high-quality print just isn't there. you can change the dpi in photoshop by going to image size andthen changing the resolution. and if you uncheck "resample image," then you can change the dpi without changing any ofthe pixel dimensions. one thing you have toconsider with dpi though is what distance you'reviewing the object from. basically the farther away you are,
the lower the dpi has to be. while images in a bookneed to be at least 300, a billboard could get awaywith something like 20 dpis since you're so far away from it. now let's get back to colorand look at the difference between plain black and rich black. with cmyk there are two waysthat you can make black. first, you could just use black ink, which is called plain black.
or, you could layercyan, magenta, and yellow right on top of each other and then put black on top of that, which gives you rich black. photoshop, illustrator, indesign, programs like that have their own ratios for what makes rich black. you don't want to just setall four values to be 100 because then you'll just haveway too much ink on the paper.
so when do you use plainblack versus rich black? for large blocks of text, you'll want to stick with plain black because if any of the printing plates are a little bit misaligned, then all of your text willend up with a colored shadow. but for an image or a large area where you really want a deep, dark black then rich black is the way to go.
i guess this is a little more about colors than i had thought it would be. okay, let's talk about spotcolors and pantone colors. spot colors are a specific color that you want to be printed besides cmyk. for example, a very specific red or green. the print shop will mix up a separate ink and it'll have its own plate. obviously the more spot colors you have,
the more expensive the job ends up being. pantone is the brand that makesthe pantone matching system. this is a standardized set ofthousands of colors of ink, all of which are numbered so that you can tell a printer,anywhere in the country, to use, say, pms 130, and it will always turnout the exact same color no matter what it lookslike on your screen. pantone also makes metallic and neon inks
and so you can start getting really fancy, outside of just cmyk. okay, finally let's talk about different file typesand what they all mean. there are two types offiles: raster and vector. a raster file is made up of pixels, like a jpeg or a png. vector means that it's madeof mathematical formulas and so it can be scaled as big as you want
without losing any quality. adobe illustrator filesare a vector files, and when you export apdf from illustrator, that's also a vector file. one thing to remember though, if you're printing from a vector file, you'll want to make sure to make outlines of all your text and to expand all of your strokes and effects.
that way there's less of a chance of a compatibilityproblem if the print shop doesn't have all your fonts or if they have a differentversion of illustrator. you'll need to talk to your print shop about what kind of filethey want specifically. they might want yourphotoshop or illustrator file so that they can export it exactly to their own specifications.
those types of files canget really big though, so you might just send it pdf, which is a much smallerfile and can embed fonts. you usually won't be printing from a jpeg just because of the loss in qualities, since it's compressed so much, and that's why it's such a small file. and tif is another typeof image file often used for printing since itdoesn't compress information.
again though, that canbecome a really big file, so make sure you ask your print shop what they need specifically. if you're just printing photoson your desktop printer, you probably won't needmost of this information. but when you're going toprofessional print shops to get hundreds or thousandsof the same thing made, this information will savethe print shop employees a lot of time gettingyour files ready to print.
and it'll save you money fromhaving to get it all redone when it doesn't comeout the way you wanted. good luck and let me know in the comments if you have any questions. also let me know if there are any subjects related to graphic design
that you want me to make a tutorial video, like this, about. i'll see you guys next time.
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