PREPRESS INFO

DIGITAL PRINTING TIPS

Digital printing is a great way to produce small-quantity, fast turnaround color printing. In the past, digital meant low quality, but these days digital presses can reach near-offset quality if you know a few tricks. Here are some things to keep in mind when printing digitally.

GAMUT

Gamut is the term used to describe the range of colors that a specific printing device can produce. If you’re coming from CMYK offset printing, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out that digital presses can handle up to a 20% wider color gamut. What this generally means is that you can use redder reds, greener greens and bluer blues. This can be a real plus when designing marketing materials that have vivid images that traditional printing simply cannot reproduce in the CMYK color space.

RICH BLACKS

If you’ve ever made the mistake of printing a large solid black area using only black ink, you’ve no doubt found out what a rich black can do for you. In traditional offset printing, you typically use a rich black formula of 60% cyan, 40% magenta, 30% yellow and 100% black – which gives you a total ink limit of 240%. This will give you a nice deep black in large solid areas.

With digital printing, you don’t need quite as much ink coverage to attain a deep rich black – which has the added bonus of allowing you to use smaller reversed out type as well. While 100% black alone will give you a much nicer black area when printing digitally compared to offset printing, you can get a nice rich black using less ink coverage by using the formula of 40% cyan, 30% magenta, 20% yellow and 100% black.

COLOR PROFILE

You can use GRACol Profile for color management.

These are the settings as they appear in your software.

Please call us at 626-795-8093 for additional information.

FILE PREPARATION

When submitting files to Typecraft we suggest that you don’t send one file after another after another. Instead, compress the file(s) into one smaller, easier-to-manage “zip” file.