Digital printing tips

Digital printing is a great way to produce low-quantity, fast turnaround color printing. In the past, digital meant extremely low quality, but these days some of the digital presses can reach near offset quality if you know a few tricks. Here are just a few 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 your marketing materials that have vivid images that traditional printing simply cannot reproduce in the CMYK color space. Now that you understand color gamut, let’s move on to how you can put it to work…

Rich Blacks

If you’ve ever made the mistake of printing a large solid black area using only black ink, you 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, 40% 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, 20% magenta, 20% yellow and 100% black.

Pantone Colors

While digital presses, much like CMYK inks, cannot reproduce Pantone colors with 100% accuracy, you can typically get a little closer when printing digitally due to the fact that color gamut is wider that when you use CMYK offset printing. Go ahead and specify Pantone colors, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Solids, Tints and Blends

There are a few areas where digital printing simply cannot stand up against traditional offset printing. Specifically, large solid areas. If you can’t avoid using large solids, try adding a slight “noise” or “texture” in the area in Photoshop. This helps avoid the banding found in solids when printing digitally. The technique also applies to gradients, which also suffer from banding when printing digitally. Tints (a percentage of a solid color) should not be less than 15% of the original color. Anything less than 15% will most likely begin to appear spotty, grainy, or simply not show up at all. Noise or slight texture to tints less than 40% will help greatly as well. Gradients and blends should be less than a 50% value change over 2 to 4 inches to attain the best results. In other words, if you’re trying to go from red to green in a gradient across a 12 inch wide area, you are not going to be happy with the results. But going from red to blue in a 3 inch area will probably look great, as would going from yellow to green in the same area. Another tip for blends or gradients where the beginning or end color is white is to NOT use the color white as the color. Instead, use 0% of the starting color. For example, to go from 100% Pantone 360 to white, set your gradient 1st stop to 100% Pantone 360 and the second stop to 0% Pantone 360 (rather than 100% white). This makes it easier for the software to come up with a smoother gradient because it thinks it only has one color to deal with, rather than two. In general, just try to avoid large solid areas of ink. Digital presses really shine when printing images, so take advantage of that!

Dot Gain and Font Sizes

With traditional offset printing you have to be concerned about dot gain. Dot gain is the process of the ink filling in the areas between the halftone dots as it dries on the paper. Digital printing beats the snot out of offset printing because there is no ink to gain, and there is no dot to fill in. What this means is that your images won’t get darker when printed, and your font sizes can be as small as 4 points on some digital presses and still be perfectly readable.

Final Notes

In some respects, digital printing is very much like offset printing as far as the pre-press area is concerned. Things you should do for setting up files apply to both methods and will always yield better results. Some of those things are:

• Image files should be 300dpi – no more, no less
• Scanned images should be scanned in RGB mode and converted to CMYK after (though some digital presses can actually print RGB images)
• Images should be scaled in Photoshop to the size you wish them to be output, not placed in Adobe InDesign and scaled from there
• Do NOT mess with color trapping. Let the printer and the RIP worry about it. If you do set specific trapping to your files, alert your printer to this fact so they can make sure that your carefully trapped file prints the way you intended it to.

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