MONOTONE

Monotone is another colour plus the media in which it is printed on. This effect looks effect as it uses different tones of one colour which enhances colour on photo's.

SPOT COLOUR

This is usually one or more colour specially mixed colours usually in the CMYK format ususing the tints of the colour.

DUOTONE

When a continuous tone in image is printed in 2 or more spot colours.This term is also used when describing tri and quadtones. This image is usuing black and blue as its spot colours.

GREYSCALE

Black and White image continuous tone, any shade of grey.

CMYK

Subtractive colour - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key Black- This is used in the most common printed process called litho or offset litho.

RGB

Additive colour - Red, Green, Blue - screen based.

Digital Printing

This process is transferring from one device to the other. This is transferred without and physical process. This technique is probably the most common method we use in our everyday lives at work, at college, schools, or even at home. It is ideally suited to short run on a range of print media. These could be from paper to card and even metal! But obviouly you can do this at home, you would have to go to a professional printers!

Rotary Prinitng

In this process all the sheets can be fed onto a roll as this is largely an automated print process.

The 3 main types of rotary prining are:
-Offset Lithography
-Rotogravure and
-Flexography.


Offset Lithography which is also know as Litho, is a common printing process for letterheads and business cards.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sICgNnb4d8

Rotogravure uses copper plates with a mirrored images to transfer ink directly to the print surface, usually on rolls. This process is more expensive than Litho, but the plates are more durable and therefore and good for long print runs. This process is good for eg.vinyl flooring, magazine pages etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIC2cFbLmAA





and finally,

Flexography also known as Flexo is usually roll fed and has a positive mirror image rubber polymer plate on a cylinder. This transfers 'sticky' ink directly onto the print surface. This process could be used for sweet wrappers, carrier bags, crsip packets etc.

Colour

Understanding colour systems for print processes

There are 2 colour processes called subtractive colour and additive colour.

Subtractive colour (CMYK): is the mixing of colours to create a range of colours, where each colour is caused by light being absorbed and relefecting colours. Subtractive colour systems start with white light. Coloured inks, paints or films are placed between the viewer and the light source or reflective surface (such as white paper) subract wavelenghts from this white, and make a colour.Subtractive colour is used in offset litho printing.

Additive colour (RGB): This process usually uses red, green and blue light to produce other colours. Combining one of these additive colours with another in equal amounts produces the additive secondary colours cyan, magenta and yellow. Combining all 3 primary colours in equal intesities produces white. Things such as, Computers, mobile phones, televisions, projectors etc that are usally screen base use this process.