A brief introduction to commercial printing

At Tara Press, our capabilities and versatility enable us to provide high quality artwork for all our printing presses. We provide our customers with a complete service, including graphic design, business communications, web design, marketing projects, point of sale, brochures, booklets, catalogues, magazines and more.

We've outlined the various stages and processes along the way in the development of the final printed outcome.

Design

Unlike many printing companies, we are fortunate in being able to organise the design work and produce all of your job in-house, working closely with Creative Factory.This ensures a high degree of quality control; each job being correctly planned with your individual requirements and preferences taken into consideration.

Whether you choose to use Creative Factory for your design concept or not is ultimately your own choice, although a decision to do so ensures the utmost in quality control, with each job customised to suit the needs and image of your company.

After the design concept and finished art have been approved for your particular job, the artwork in the form of an electronic file is output to film for colour separations. Separations will depend upon how many colours the design of your job is based on.

Offset Printing Explained

Colour images need to be separated into primary colours in order to be printed. The primary ink colours create the four colour process, consisting of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.

Printing presses can only print solid colour in the image area, while no ink prints in the non-image areas. To achieve the required result, the image is converted into a pattern of very small and clearly defined dots. This process is called screening. The printed result is an optical illusion, relying on the eye to mix the dots of the four process colours.

The pictures displayed right show the final result (top), with the four colour process separations underneath. Amounts of the four process colours differ across the image, combining to give the final mix of colours.

Special colours are those which are independent from the four colour process. Some examples are metallic, fluorescent and Pantone (PMS) inks, commonly known as spot colours.

The four colour process cannot always adequately simulate special colours. At times, results can be quite similar, but in many cases it is not accurate enough, and additional special colour inks are used to achieve the required result.

At Tara Press, we have the advantage of being able to produce a print job using up to six colours in one pass, whereas many other printers would take two passes of the press to achieve this.

Screening Options

A halftone screen is composed of millions of microscopic dots drawn by the laser beam of a postcript imagesetter. In conventional halftone screening, a number of laser dots are combined into "cells" to form halftone dots. A certain number and arrangement of dots will be laid down with each cell, depending on the resolution and line screen specified.

Dpi

Dpi refers to the number of distinct pixels that can be created on each linear inch of output, whether on a printer or on a computer screen. Dpi is a measure of resolution.

Lpi

Lpi is a measure of screen frequency. Dots are put together to form halftone cells, the size of which depends on how many lines of dots per inch can be handled by the printer. Screen frequencies range from 55 to 200 lpi and are applied according to the quality of print required and cost.