Printing Glossary
CMYK - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. The four colour printing process. Each colour signifies a colour plate, (Black is known as the ‘key’ plate, hence the ‘K’).
RGB - Abbreviation of Red Green Blue. Method of connecting a colour screen to a computer, involving three separate signals. All the colours displayed by the screen can be made up from these three additive component colours. For print repro, however, files should be given in CMYK or as Pantone colours.
Grayscale - A black & white image in which pixel brightness values are recorded on a scale of 0 to 255 from black to white.
Halftone/Tint - A technique for reproducing a continuous tone, where colour is broken into dots, the greater the dots, the fuller the tone of colour.
Solid - Any area of the sheet receiving 100% ink coverage, as compared to halftone/tint.
Spot Colour - A solid colour with a single matching ink (commonly PANTONE).
Pantone® - The brand name of a colour matching system produced by PANTONE, INC. A large range of inks are specified and identified by number to produce standard results across the industry.
Bleed - The printed image extends beyond the trim edge of a sheet or page. A bleed may occur at the head, front, foot and/or gutter of a page. It is not possible to print all the way to the edge of the paper sheet. To achieve this effect it is necessary to print a larger area than is required and then trim the paper down. Typically a designer would allow an extra 3mm of bleed to colour and image areas to allow for a little leeway when trimming.
Crop - To trim or mask a document or image so that it fits a given area, or so that unwanted portions can not be seen. Crop marks at the edges of an illustration or photograph indicate the portion to be reproduced.
EPS - Encapsulated Postscript File. A file where the image is stored using geometric formulae (rather than bitmapped). This means it is scalable without loss of quality. We usually ask clients to supply images such as logos in eps format with text converted into outlines.
PDF - (Portable Document Format), ideal for printing as it mantains the layout of the original file and the sharpness of a vector image.
JPEG - (The Joint Photographic Experts Group) was formed to create a standard for color and gray scale image compression. JPEG is the default format for most digital cameras.
Resolution - The number of dots per inch (dpi) in a computer-processed document. The level detail retained by a printed document increases with higher resolution.
Font - A complete set of characters, including Capitals, lowercase, figures and punctuation. Some fonts won’t be available in all these aspects.
Serif, Sans Serif - Serif fonts have small finishing strokes to them, giving a font a particular character, Sans-serif fonts do not have these strokes to them, and are modern in appearance
Embossing - The process of creating a three-dimensional image or design in paper and other ductile materials. The term “impressing” enables one to distinguish an image lowered into the surface of a material, in distinction to an image raised out of the surface of a material.
Thermography - The process that applies powder to ink while the ink is wet and is heated and cured to give a high gloss raised image.
Diestamping/Engraving - The process that enables an image to be lowered into the surface of a material.