Full color (CMYK) printing and Pantone® spot color printing?

Full color printing, also known as four color process, is a printing process using Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks.  These inks, sometimes referred to as CMYK or primary colors, print using variations of both solid and screen tints or halftones which bleed together to produce a wide spectrum of colors.  Over the last few decades color printing has become widely used for many printing applications even for small companies.  High printing costs associated with full color printing has dramatically dropped as new technology has emerged.

Spot Color Printing is a method of printing where the desired color is a solid color of ink (in many cases specially mixed ink) that is used to print the sheet with.  For example if you wanted a business card with just Pantone 348U Green ink on it, we would put green ink in the press and print just that color.  But as technology has changed and improved we no longer to it this way.  Now all spot ink colors are converted to their CMYK equivalent which saves our customers considerably on inks, ink mixes, printing plates, and other associated costs with spot color printing.

With modern state of the art presses, all files containing spot colors are converted to CMYK automatically by the digital front end (or RIP) of the printing press.

*Pantone is a registered trademark of Pantone, Inc.