Artwork

Bleed & Crops

Images, background colours and fills which are intended to print to the trimmed edge of the page should be extended 3mm beyond the page to give a "bleed" (to allow for tolerances in the cutting process). Text, boxes and other areas you need on your finished job should ideally be 5mm in from the edges of the page.

Pantone

There are a large number of variables which can affect the colour produced in Full Colour Printing. Simply looking at the appearance of colours on a monitor - especially if no monitor calibration has been carried out - is unlikely to produce predictable printed results.

In just the same way an un-calibrated desktop printer, such as a laser or inkjet may well produce very different colours to those produced on a professional printing press.

It is much better to choose and use colours from printed swatches since these give an accurate representation of what the finished result will be.

Pantone® limited are a company which is respected throughout the print industry for the quality and consistency of their colour matching products. We are pleased to stock several different Pantone® Colour matching books for different requirements. The price of these books is detailed below together with a brief description of each book.

Proofs

Our service does not include proofs. We simply check your files against the Client Copy Proofs provided and proceed to print. The system is extremely fast and efficient.

We recognise, however, that in some circumstances proofs are desirable and we are pleased to produce proofs from your Digital Artwork for you to check prior to printing. There are three types of proof we can send you.

PDF Proof

PDF proofs are sent digitally via email. They are ideal for checking layout and content but are not colour accurate and so are of little use when there are issues of colour, such as matching to a House colour.

Laser Proof

Laser Proofs are sent by post and provide something tangible to look at. Again, these are not colour accurate and their use is limited to content and layout proofing.

Wet Proof

Wet proofs are the very best match to the finished job since they are a small run of the finished job on press. We would always recommend a small run of print (to be used as a wet proof) prior to any very large run of print.

Hexachrome Printing

For most printing conventional colour made up of cyan, magenta, yellow and black is quite acceptable. Where extra vibrancy and impact is needed Hexachrome maybe the answer. In the Hexachrome process the normal cyan, magenta, yellow and black colours of conventional printing are supplemented with orange and green. This means a much greater range of Pantones can be reproduced accurately, and pictures look much more vibrant and life-like.

There are currently no economical ways of proofing Hexachrome. We would always recommend a small print run to 'prove' the artwork before a large Hexachrome job is printed.

Please make sure that your art/design package supports Hexachrome and exports to a printable file.

Metal FX®

Metal FX® is a process which allows any number of metallic colours to be incorporated in to a conventional CMYK print job. An ultra opaque fast drying silver is applied in various tints in the areas to be metallisized and tints of CMYK inks are applied on top to produce the metallics. The eye-catching effects that can be achieved are possible without the excessive extra cost normally associated with process plus spot colour print.

Full Colour Printing

Full Colour printing (Process Printing) is a printing is a technique widely used today. This process allows you to produce nearly every colour under the rainbow.

The process invloves separatating files to be printed in to four color components: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key, also called black. The color separation is known as color screening, this is a generally a digital process. A separate print plate will be made for each color. Each plate is created as a halftone, meaning that the color is separated into a series of tiny dots. In areas where there is very little colour, the dots will be small and spaced well apart. In areas of colour strong, the dots will be larger, and may have no space in between them.

Each plate is printed separately and overlaid over the previously printed ink. When all four plates have been printed, the result is a color image. The small dots on each individual plate will come together to create a complete color image, although they can still be seen with the aid of a magnifying glass. If the plates are not properly aligned during the printing process, the result is a misregistered image which is blurry and illegible. See Stochatic Screening