Traditional Colour Printing
Our Traditional Colour press is a web offset press, exactly the same as any colour tabloid newspaper you can pick up in a newsagent. For a quick sample, pick up a copy of The Sun, The Mirror or similar.
A web offset newspaper press uses four inks – cyan, magenta, yellow and ‘key’ (black), often abbreviated to CMYK. Four metal plates are made up, one for each of these colours. During the printing process the paper rolls over these plates and the ink is transferred to the page in varying amounts. These amounts are defined in percentages in your software. For example, a dark blue might be made up of 100% cyan and 100% magenta, also written as C100 M100 Y0 K0.
Please note: RGB (red, green, blue) is the colour system that most software defaults to. Make sure that you’ve checked that your software supports CMYK mode and you’re using it.
You should use CMYK for all your colours throughout your newspaper. For those in the know: no spot colours are available. We’ve made a handy guide to what colours look good on paper – keep to these and you’ll be fine:
There are two main issues to be aware of when designing a colour newspaper: the registration and the ink coverage. We’ll explain both.
Registration
The registration is the name given to the alignment of the colour plates. It’s difficult to keep this precise, especially on smaller runs, but our printers take good care.
Registration issues are most noticable in areas of fine detail, such as text. Small type (under 12pt, or 14pt if the font is a fine serif) should always be made up from only one of the inks. Since cyan, magenta and yellow tend to be a bit bright for most situations, it’s safest making your text a percentage of black. Other colours can be used for larger headlines, especially in a sans-serif font.
White text inside a coloured box is called ‘reversed out’. You should make sure you use 12pt for this – any smaller and the bleed or blurring of the ink will probably make it unreadable.
Gradients should be avoided – they never look as good on paper as they do on screen.
Ink Coverage
Ink coverage is the other thing that often catches people. Too much ink applied to a page can cause problems drying and smear or soak the paper.
Remember, the printer is adding a layer of ink for every colour you specify (C or M or Y or K) so if you specify 90% cyan plus 85% magenta plus 80% black that page is going to covered in three layers of ink. Newsprint can’t cope with that. The maximum ink coverage we’ll allow is 240% but, to be on the safe side, we’d encourage you to stay well below that. 100% black is fine and will produce a good result. 90% cyan plus 85% magenta plus 80% black and you risk smearing.
Be careful when importing dark photographs or illustrations – often these are in the RGB colour space (for display on monitors) and need converting to CMYK using an appropriate profile. ne14design.co.uk has a useful guide which explains how to go about converting these images in Photoshop.
ICC Colour Profile
An ICC Colour Profile handles the conversion of colours between your screen and the printer. It will ensure your images will look good on newsprint, and manages the ink coverage to stay below our limits.
Please use the ISOnewspaper26v4.icc colour profile. Just download the file and follow these instructions to install it, ready to be used in your software.