Choosing the right ink combinations can have a dramatic effect on your
finished product. Use this handy ink guide to help you make the correct
ink selection.
- Black ink, as you might expect, is the most common and least expensive ink.
- Spot colors and tints are printed with premixed inks. You can
choose from among thousands of different spot-color inks. A spot color
printed at 100% is a solid color and has no dot pattern. A tint is a
lightened spot or process color and is created by printing smaller
halftone dots of the base color.
- Process colors are reproduced by printing overlapping dots
(halftone screens) of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) inks.
Since CMYK inks are translucent, they absorb some colors and reflect
others. To create blue, for example, you combine cyan dots and magenta
dots. Your eyes merge the cyan and magenta dots to perceive the color
blue. Process (CMYK) printing gives us the ability to simulate
photographic images using just four basic ink colors.
