so it turns out it doesn't matter if it's an iphone from 2020 or a printing press from the 1900s a lot of the same techniques get used to reproduce images all right so digital prepress and printing or how printing works how to look for clues and what industry commonalities commonalities you will find when you're out there working in the design industry so uh we spoke a little bit before about sort of how we arrived at the printing technology that we have now uh from the printing press up to modern times with the sort of advent of the internet and the rapid acceleration of technology into more screen based forms but when it comes to printing technology sort of on aggregate as a whole there's a lot of different terms that are going to get thrown around out there in the industry and just some terms and stuff that you should know and really it's more about sort of understanding the why and when you would use them and not so much like what the exact technical specification is so to me specifically when it comes to printing these are just things i want you to know it's more of a good to know then like you will fail if you don't know what grab your printing is so that said as we discuss these different types of printing you're going to run into some very common printing terms so you will frequently hear the difference between web and sheet fed like whether a printer is sheet fed or web and that sounds tricky and weird but it's as simple as it as it really is sheet fed is a printer that takes sheets so whether that's your printer at home that you lay a piece of paper in and it does individual sheets or some huge multi-million dollar press that eats you know four foot by four foot sheets at hundreds of copies per second either way if it's a flat sheet of paper that moves as an individual sheet and gets pushed through in sheets and comes in stacks that is a sheet fed printer and then a web-based printer is paper that comes off of a huge roll so if you've ever seen the old timey news things where it's like extra extra read all about it and there's a huge spool of paper just whipping through an insane amount of copies that is a web press so sheet fed uses paper web press is the big spool a substrate is a word you will frequently hear when we discuss these sort of things substrate is just like a industry term for what are you printing on so paper is a substrate plastic is a substrate you know an antique vodka bottle could be a substrate it's just like what what is the material that you are going to apply the ink to that is your substrate you'll you might hear words like plate cylinder or screen either used interchangeably or depending on what method we're talking about suffice to say plates cylinders and screens all do the same thing but they are very different things and we'll get into what they they are here in a minute but a plate is effectively just like a big aluminum or uh other substrate um that has been engraved for the transfer of ink a cylinder is the same thing it's a big metal cylinder that has engraving on it that then allows ink to be transferred and a screen is like you've seen with screen printing um or even a screen door on a house a screen is like a literal screen that has an image burn burnt into it that ink is then scraped through so plates cylinders and screens are all different ways of transferring an image to a piece of paper or to a substrate as far as like the number of colors is concerned colors is just inks and i think a lot there can sometimes be confusion regarding like whether a project is four color or three color and does that mean literally only these three colors or does it mean those three colors can be mixed and make a billion other colors really the number of colors is just referring to the physical amount of inks that are being used so if you're doing like a cyan magenta yellow and black print and it's cmyk that is frequently called four color process you are using four colors to produce you know a million other colors in their gradations so when we talk about things specifically with the terms of printing here we are going to talk about the number of inks that are being used and kind of what the benefits and pros and cons are of setting up jobs with different ink amounts whether that's a one color job a four color job or using pantones and pms colors and all that stuff you will also frequently hear these terms thrown around around a lot you've got resolutions dots pixels fidelity quality all that sort of stuff we'll get into it a bit later on um regarding what that means but just know that like the resolution of something or the dots involved in something the fidelity the quality all that's pretty simple to understand like the more you have the better it is the less you have the worse it is so if it's low resolution low dots low fidelity low quality all bad high resolution high dots high fidelity high quality all good so that one's pretty straightforward but as we get into this and we sort of move from the gutenberg printing press up to printing today there are different types of printings out printing out there in the industry uh and a lot of them it really depends sort of what you're attempting to do so um we talked a little bit about the letterpress when we were talking about gutenberg and the letterpress really is what it sounds like like you take metal carvings and you have plates uh or little pieces either metal type set or graphics and you physically press an image with it to imprint onto a piece of paper uh generally speaking this is a very like analog hand craft and it's used more antique and specialty uses um and we'll get into specifics on all these later so i'll just kind of zip through this there's flexography uh often referred to as flexo and that's generally used for packaging like potato chips juice bottles stuff like that gravure which is used for magazines packaging or art and content warning there that word seems to have been overtaken by kind of a a subset of japanese culture involving scantily clad models so google at your own risk frequently uh people call the term now rodog reviewer because it's put on a rotary rolling drum so you'll you'll have a lot more success finding that topic if you google the other term um digital printing so that usually is used on apparel so even this shirt probably was digital printed and then screen printing also frequently used on apparel and then last but not least offset lithographic printing sometimes just called offset uh that's used generally just on like paper substrates and this is by far um at least in my experience what you will interact with most as a designer unless you are specifically working in like a packaging or apparel industry like if you're just doing business cards brochures catalogs large format signage stuff like that you'll probably run into offset a whole bunch all right so let's dive into what these are all right so for all of these different methods of printing i've selected a couple videos that do a great job of explaining them in depth uh straight from the horse's mouth from people who work there and use the technology but for the purpose of this video i'll just kind of show the video up here kind of so you can get a sense of what it looks like and feels like and then i will give you kind of a high level recap of them how the method operates and sort of the the benefits and high level takeaways for each printing method so for letterpress um as we discussed back with the like gutenberg movable type era letterpress is still very much that type of technology for every little letter letter whether that be a individual letter a word or you know something more like an illustration you you have to physically cast a die and then take those dies put them into a case and kind of build out what you're actually attempting to print and if you watch this video up here you can get a sense that this is kind of more of an old world approach just in the way you go about it it's very tactile very analog and it isn't something that you would just sort of take up on a whim um you can see by the sort of harry potter-esque nature of this guy's shop like it requires a lot of tools and a lot of setup and cost so it's not something that you just sort of fall backward into you would you would need access to this type of metal casting and things in order to do this type of work so as in terms of its popularity it obviously sort of kicked off this whole printing revolution with this method of printing so it was very popular kind of died off um and now it's it's having somewhat of a comeback in terms of its uh resurgence in a very like niche way because it's kind of hip old worldly it's got a certain cachet value to it but it's definitely sort of prohibitively expensive to just dive into um and then in terms of like how often you'll run into it just as like a regular graphic designer out there in the world um again specialty projects very sort of super niche there might be like one place in your town or city that has this type of stuff and you could go there i know that there's a place downtown here that has similar things um but it's not like every print house you're going to interact with will have like a letterpress section where all of this stuff exists it's very much a different method that kind of is more rarely used today uh as far as examples go um letterpress examples might look something like this generally speaking since the cost is tends to be prohibitive uh you you only see it used in sort of these grandiose applications like a wedding invitation or a 40th anniversary for something because sort of the importance of the event meets the importance of the need for this method of printing and the cost involved they're in so usually when you look at examples of letterpress they have embossing debossing kind of limited colors because you only want to do pressing and plating for one or two things you don't want to do you know tremendous amounts of registration and printing with this method usually works best for this type of execution so i don't know maybe it's just me but the more i look at stuff like this it all sort of has a similar feel and i think the longer that you're around different types of printing you can kind of just pick it out just from the way that it looks and feels but suffice to say letterpress printing is very very expensive very niche and very sort of suited to specialty in terms of how often you'll use it with a client project pretty low but you might do it just as like a hobby or something that you find interesting next up uh flexography or flexo so like i mentioned before this is heavily used in packaging i think in my personal career i did maybe five or six different flexo projects for like juice bottles and cherry packages and things like that and flexo is heavily used in packaging because it allows you to print on clear film which is usually something that's required for packaging either to wrap on something like a poly bag or you know a thin piece of plastic that wraps around a bottle printing on film and more unique substrates is sort of a crowning feature of flexography so if you're trying to print on something that's kind of wobbly or amorphous or something like a bottle this is where this method becomes tremendously helpful it generally uses the web printing method um i say generally just because i don't they're i feel like there might be some weird one out there that does sheet fed but like 99 of the time this will be a web press and web presses are those big drums of substrate or print or film that then spin and kind of whip through all of the various rollers of the machine as you can see here and the reason that is is because usually film needs sort of that tensile strength in order to be pulled through the machine if you tried to take like a three foot wide sheet of plastic film and shoot it through this at high speeds it would just you know get obliterated so uses the web printing method for a long continuous spool of graphic um and then gets cut afterward in terms of how it gets produced this one uses plates similar to offset printing which we'll cover here in a minute where the actual artwork is broken out into separations usually cyan magenta yellow black or some sort of one color two color three color method and then those plates are used on the actual drums which you can see or the cylinders the plate cylinders and the impression cylinders uh and the cylinder spins the plate picks up the ink and then pushes it directly onto the film um this particular method of printing at least in my experience really heavily relies on illustrator i don't know if that's just like an industry thing but you don't usually see people setting up graphics for flexography in photoshop or indesign just something about the way the illustrator handles colors swatches in the way of preparing a file in a large sheet tends to be how it is i think four or five different companies i've worked with all required their artwork to get hand over to them as an ai file so just something to know i don't know if that's like industry truth i had a hard time finding it on the internet but that was my personal experience with it um and then as far as the quality of this you get very high fidelity very high resolution crisp prints this way and if you've ever looked really close up at like an m m's package or a juice bottle or something generally speaking the quality is very high dpi and you can't pick out all of the individual sort of dots and more a pattern so those are sort of the benefits and pros and cons of flexography as far as examples it's like if you've ever walked through a grocery store you've seen flexography so you know potato chips juice corn flakes a lot of times it comes up in packaging too because you need to have certain standards for food safe substrates that you can print on food safe inks uh and all sorts of various health regulations and so it's not like you can just take any random ink from any random person or any random paper and print on it if it's gonna come in contact with food so flexographic printing has a lot of caveats for handling food safe things that you wouldn't normally consider when just doing a regular project but if you've ever gone into again any sort of food aisle you've seen hundreds of different printed printed examples of flexo especially here in the united states because we tend to use flexo a lot more than graveyard which to that point uh greviewer or rota reviewer is uh very similar to flexo and the fact that it generally can be printed on films but in different substrates but it can also be used on paper i think the sort of primary difference between a reviewer and a flexo print is that gravure uses way more ink and it's just if you go watch the full video essentially it has a larger well of ink that the rotary viewer cylinder spins through and it just results in a much richer image um and and the plates and cylinders that get used or rather the cylinders that get used to apply the ink to the film tend to last longer than the the plate method of offset so gravure really comes in handy if you're printing a very large volume of something that you want to be very clear and if you think about it that way it's like that would be great for magazines or large volumes of art prints or you know it could even be packaging like i'm looking at a mountain dew box it could be like hundreds of thousands of copies of a mountain dew box where the color's the same the product's the same and you want really high fidelity interestingly enough the split between flexo and gravure in the united states is around like 80 20. we tend to do 80 flexo for our packaging and about 20 for reviewer and it's the opposite in other countries so actually out in like europe and asia um one stat i found showed that eight out of the ten top brands in i believe it was germany prefer using reviewer over flexo just due to the quality and the richness of the print as i described earlier so a graveyard print can sort of achieve similar things as flexo might be a little bit more expensive but the quality tends to be better um so just in terms of sort of a cost benefit analysis it really determines if you want to use you know if you're going to be printing hundreds of thousands of copies anyway you might as well get the the richest image you can um so greviewer i personally have never had to set up a job specifically for reviewer i think again that's probably a function of the fact that when we're in the us and it's not a terribly common method of printing here but the setup would be the same as a flexo or standard four color print where you might have separations the print tech might do it for you split everything out to cyan magenta yellow black or you know whatever one two three colors you're using for your job and then each cylinder takes care of a color and it pumps it through the machine as far as gravure examples this one's a little bit harder because it's like there's no real way to know if it's a flexo or a reviewer when you just see it out in an aisle but generally speaking a magazine was probably reviewer and a large volume art prince if you've ever seen like a monet replication or something that would be reviewer but if you're just like randomly walking through a shopping island you pick up a bag of halls like in the example here could go either way there's really no way to know unless you were involved in the specking process um overall the the quality will look very similar to the to the to the naked eye i guess unless you're like really examining it you're not gonna be able to tell the difference between the two um but again it's a little less common here in the united states uh but just worth knowing about next up is digital printing so this is the method for pretty much any printer you've ever interacted with just as like a lay person like the printer at your house the printer that your parents use the printers at kendall that you would go print off a large project digital printing is great for low quantities because it utilizes inkjet technology which is different than all of this plate cylinder stuff we've been talking about previously and inkjet technology is exactly what it sounds like there's little jets inside of a head and the jets just spray ink they are ink jets and they travel back and forth across the piece of paper and only lay ink down exactly where you need it and so if you're just printing a one off of a poster for class or you know a quick stack of 20 flyers or something this is an amazing technology because it doesn't need plates and all this additional setup and you can just kind of spit out one quick thing and not have to worry about the crazy amount of overhead um i guess the only real overhead with these is the little print cartridges that generally go in there cost more than unicorn blood for some reason but once you have them in there they tend to last quite a while and you can get a lot of prints out of it generally speaking most digital printers are cmyk so they're a four color setup occasionally like a really high-end one i think some of the ones that we have at the print lab are actually uh involved six color they have a light cyan and a dark cyan and a light magenta and a dark magenta um and if you see that it's really just to get a sharper uh clarity of color it it's not all of that different than just regular cmyk occasionally these types of printers can have like a a clear coat or a separate chamber for a special finishing technique i know i had an epson printer that had a special clear coat one so you could do varnishes and those varnishes would be applied just the same way a color would be applied you would have a separate channel in the same way that you would tell it i want yellow to go here by specifying a yellow channel you would just specify large blocks of color in the coding channel and that's where it would apply the coating um the printing with these is done in passes like i mentioned it kind of goes back and forth with a printing head across the print the only sort of downside of that is that the quality can vary greatly depending on how much ink and speed you're needing so if you were to tell it i want to prioritize speed for my print um sometimes this is called like high quality versus low quality or fast versus slow in the little printer dialogue if you tell it to optimize for speed the printheads kind of just zip by real quick and just lay down one or two passes of ink and that can result in what's called banding and banding is probably anytime you've ever been disappointed in a print and seen those faint white lines kind of passing through your print it just means the print head didn't lay down enough ink it would be like if you dipped your paint roller kind of really terribly in a paint bucket before applying it on the wall and you know every fifth rotation of the thing leaves a gap same sort of thing here if you if you don't tell it to be high quality and take its time the inkjet will kind of just zip by and not do a great job if you do tell it to prioritize uh quality it'll do multiple passes and make sure the ink is really rich that can gobble up the amount of ink that you have in your cartridges and it can sometimes make the print even feel like wet and heavy with how much ink is on there but great for low quantities great for sort of residential use home use and these also get used all the time with things like this where you can digitally print directly onto a garment for again low quantities people doing like apparel startups stuff like that digital printing can just be great for that just know that the quality can vary greatly depending on how much you invest as far as digital printing examples this one's kind of hard to pick out because like generally speaking if it's just something you did it probably was a digital printing example but out there in the world it's hard to know if somebody ran you know a hundred thousand copies of a flyer or twenty but if you look at like a digital printing a digitally printed piece it will have uh more of a like not necessarily like low quality but like lower lower quantity lower scope projects will tend to be digitally printed so mock-ups for projects for clients flyers that you see in the hallway are pasted up by people one-off prints for school you know shirts that only you make 10 or 20 copies of so things like that usually inform you that it's been digitally printed more than say the quality because like i said if the quality is ramped up real high it's kind of hard to pick it out just by virtue of how it looks next up is screen printing uh so if you've ever seen somebody working on apparel that tends to be the place where screen printing really shines because it has very high quality final prints and can be printed on soft substrates like fabric and it's very vibrant when it's done i don't know if you've ever bought a t-shirt where like this one the color stays fine no matter how many times i wash it but then there's those other types of t-shirts where it's like almost like a plastic film that's been stuck to the shirt so the high quality ones where it seems like the ink is really embedded into the fabric that was a screen printed one screen printing sort of similar to some of the methods we discussed earlier is very resource intensive so you're going to need screens you're going to need individual vials of ink you're going to need the little plates and scrapers to pull the ink through the screen there's just a lot of setup and cost involved so it's generally a terrible idea for just like a one-off um because you could invest hundreds of dollars in setup just to get one product [Music] but it works very great for multiple prints of highly graphic illustrative imagery so not necessarily like a straight four color photographic representation of something but more like a graphic t-shirt that has literally two colors like a yellow and a red or a black and a blue um this method is also very analog and tactile as you can see in the video it involves lots of mixing of inks and laying things on screens and setting up lights like it's a very hands-on process and much like all the other printing methods involved here the more inks or more colors you do the more cost you're going to incur because every color needs a screen and every screen needs this process so there's going to be a whole lot going on for every different color that you set up and generally speaking this is used primarily for apparel and occasionally art prints i know um like a couple band bands i've seen have like you know limited run 300 copy art prints at their show and they're usually like one or two colors some local artists did it like that that tends to be a common use for this type of thing uh as far as examples like i said this sort of stuff pretty much every t-shirt you've seen if it's got that nice quality to it was either digitally printed or screen printed um digital printing tends to have more color than screen printing so if it's like a really highly graphic shirt like this high roller one or that um rap and rock one i can't really read it uh that was probably screen printed and then occasionally you'll see it with like again wedding invitations or our posters um it's pretty easy to pick out uh usually the ink by virtue of being pulled through the screen sometimes has little like almost air bubble like imperfections and i think that also gives it sort of its old worldly uh quality so those sorts of like little imperfections often can tip you off uh for the production method as well where digital printing tends to just be uniformly perfect top to bottom and then last but not least we have offset lithography so offset lithography sometimes just called offset sometimes called litho like one of the major printers in zealand here in michigan it's called holland litho it's referring to this word here offset lithography it gets its name from the fact that with a direct printing method you put the plate on the cylinder the cylinder rolls through the ink and then the ink presses onto the paper that's direct printing with offset um one of the guys credited for its invention actually realized by a goof that if the plate cylinder spread the ink onto a rubber cylinder prior to putting it on the paper the image quality actually improved um it got a little less blurry and so that's where offset gets its name that the the printed cylinder the um the plate cylinder that has the metal actual plate of the arch pushes onto the offset rubber cylinder which pushes onto the paper so the fact that the image is offset by a step is where it gets its name um but this particular method is kind of the most widely used in terms of just like standard graphic design projects so business cards letterheads envelopes um flyers catalogs like anytime you just see medium to large quantities like fifty thousand to five hundred thousand and it's four color process you just need a lot of it you need it to look good it's cost effective and it's great for large volumes the only uh sort of difference here is that the plates do wear out over time so you can't just use them indefinitely so if you were going to be doing you know millions and millions and millions of copies over and over again that's where you might look to more of like a reviewer sort of setup but generally speaking like i said most projects i think probably more than 90 percent of my portfolio was probably printed this way and it's just very popular and very widely used especially here in the united states there's even whole companies with this right in their name um so uh as far as you're concerned when you are told by a printer like hey just send me a pdf because we're going to press it's probably going into this type of press this type of scenario i don't know that anybody would ever tell you that but that's highly likely when you're using just like a standard project it's probably doing something like this [Music] and so to that point when you get into examples you know 90 of the stuff you see out there if it involves cmyk separation it was probably this so you're talking posters catalogs business cards brochures at your dentist office uh you know any of that stuff like to a large degree um depending on the quantity even if you go with like a vistaprint or something like that they're probably printing your cards in mocked up on a huge sheet with a lot of other clients and running it all offset as well usually when people print something digitally they disclose that to you because there's sort of a trade-off in quality there if they're not telling you it's printed digitally with like a vista print or i think there's one called like moo cards but in any of those online things that sort of are direct to print you just upload the artwork and they take care of it it's probably going to be all right so now that we've looked at all these different types of printing and again feel free to go down and watch the links and actually listen to the full commentary about each one i tried to find a very informative one that isn't more than like five to ten minutes long about each one they're very in-depth very interesting great information to know but as you look at all these things and you're like whoa flexo and litho and plates and cylinders and all this stuff it's kind of like holy cow there's a lot of information out there for me what i think is most important for you to know about this is that what they have in common kind of trumps what they have in difference so it may feel like there's a lot of weird nuance to all of it but generally they all use a lot of the same methods and that's what we're going to cover here so as far as it relates to you in a like typical graphic design career i would say generally speaking for most common projects so we're talking like brochures catalogs business cards um flyers like ink on paper type of graphic design projects specs for what to do and how to set up your file are going to come from the printer to you uh so this whole idea of like well what do i pick and what works for me just kind of donut you don't have to worry about it it's more going to be like i'm going to ask a printer to print something they're going to give me a quote and if i like the price that's what i'm going to go with you don't really need to worry about what their setup is it's more expecting a final deliverable and in my experience um i've never had a project at least in my 20 years of doing this where cost wasn't really the driving factor that picked all of this stuff anyway i know in my younger career i talked a lot about die cuts and trying to get gold foil stamping and you know clear coating and all this interesting stuff and every client i ever had maybe you know i just have cheaper clients i don't know i think pretty much every company behaves this way is that you say hey here's all these cool printing techniques it'll be ten dollars per piece and they go whoa hold up it'll be 30 cents per piece if we just do cmyk printing on paper and that generally is what happens uh and i think that's just sort of the nature of the world people don't want to do exorbitant things unless of course it comes to like wedding invitations or funeral programs like very large events where people sort of throw caution to the wind in terms of how much money they spend on things but a general client doing a common project usually looks for cost efficiency first and that kind of puts a bit of a damper on these weirder more production oriented techniques not to say you won't run into it but that's just been my experience so as far as like a common project you might run into goes specs for how to set up the file will come from the printer generally that's as a result of cost efficiency and it generally will involve mass quantities so you know a catalog with 200 000 copies a business card with a hundred thousand copies things like that um when you get more into specialty projects like you know 50 hand done wedding invitations or you know 30 hand carved whatever that type of stuff is where it tends to go more designer to printer communication where you're like this is the specific way i want this created this has a very specific aesthetic to it this is the method i want used so specialty projects tend to be more cost ineffective you're gonna be you know two dollars a piece three dollars a piece ten dollars a piece um and they're very low quantities so a good way to think about it is just kind of a flip flop or an inverse like if you're just like working at a regular job grinding out a project it's probably going to be very cost effective with high quantities and use like an offset litho solution but if you're like working more of an artisan way or working on a freelance project for a friend and they have a larger budget and it's sort of very nuanced and specialty then you're going to have lower quantities more unique printing methods and more sort of designer to printer communication instead of printer to designer communication um but the real takeaway here is just what these methods have in common um is they all kind of use the same way of putting an image together and so regardless of the printing method the printing is done one color at a time you never just get like some magical final image that gets pushed onto a piece of paper each color is applied by a plate screen or a cylinder and each color is called a separation so they're done one at a time in rapid succession super high speed but needless to say all the way from gutenberg up till now we have to lay down each color one at a time um and so that might look something like this where you have uh like a fabric design broken out in terms of it's blue it's dark blue it's red it's yellows and it kind of goes through a series of rollers and each roller is responsible for putting an individual color on or it might look something like that screen printing example this was the one i referenced earlier where you have a cyano magenta a yellow and a black and each screen you pull the color through and it provides additional fidelity to the final image so you get the yellow pass the cyan pass the magenta path and the black past and the final image looks generally photographic but each separation is just an ink it doesn't necessarily need to be cyan magenta yellow and black it could be any number of things which we'll get into later but a separation is just an individual color applied at an individual time and sometimes when you're doing a print project they might ask you for separations and if they do that just means taking your final design and sort of breaking it into its component color parts so when we think about separations it's kind of like you generally hear the terms cmyk for print and rgb for screen and invariably someone always asks why don't we just print an rgb that's a valid question and the reason we don't print in rgb is because rgb is an additive color process and cmyk is subtractive and the difference between additive and subtractive is that with an additive color process the more of it you add you approach white so this is sort of how light behaves um if you've ever held up a prism or seen the cover of dark side of the moon where white light goes in and then it fractures out into the colors that is how light behaves um and so that's why when you're in photoshop the more you add of the slider like when you're at zero you're black and when you add 255 of each slider you get white rgb cumulatively adds up to white and that's because light is being emitted from the screen to your eyes like it is producing a a visual stimulus using light cmyk on the other hand is a subtractive color process and that is when the more you add you get black and the example i always give is like i'm terrible at painting and every time i've ever tried to paint in my life i'm like oh this yellow needs to be a little bit darker let me add to it let me add to it and then put everything's brown like no matter what i do i try to mix ink and it just goes to crap immediately and that whole idea of like the more you add you get black is because the ink itself is what's carrying the pigment it's not light and so you have to put the pigment down on paper and then let light from your eyes or the sun or you know the room bounce off of it and go into your eye and we won't get into the whole science of how that works but essentially colors absorb different wavelengths of light and you know a ton of different colors in one spot becomes black and it absorbs all the light so subtractive the more you add you get black additive the more you add you get white the difference being how light behaves in the scenario screens obviously have light that they can emit paper does not um and so that's also why when you look at the sliders in photoshop for cmyk they behave opposite of rgb you start with zero producing white the more you add up to a hundred you get black there is of course another process here which we'll get into in a different lecture but if you've ever heard people talk about pantone colors or the pms a pms color just stands for pantone matching system um a pms color is actually an ink that is that color so like you could have pms 385 or whatever a very specific shade of red and that could be like kellogg's red and that ink is that color like when it goes through the press there is a well of physical ink that is that color that then gets pressed on the paper the difference and sort of the weird part that confuses people is that a a pantone color you can attempt to reproduce it using a traditional method like cmyk and usually anytime you see these little cards they they tell you what the breakdowns are to get as close as possible using cmyk rgb or hex values in photoshop and the reason they do that is because using a pantone ink can be prohibitively expensive so usually at least again in my experience you might have a pantone that you like and that you're attempting to match but when it actually goes to print you use a cheaper method like offset lithography and instead of having you know a cyan plate a magenta plate a yellow plate and a pms 385 plate you just attempt to produce the shade of red from pms 385. i'm really hoping i'm remembering that right but that color with the other colors so instead of even trying to like buy all of these individual inks and set up a press with a very specific pms color you just attempt to match it using what's called process colors like cyan magenta yellow and black so that isn't to say you'll never actually use pantones but i feel like in my daily life i hear the word pantone thrown around i hear people attempting to match to pantones almost daily and nothing we ever do actually gets reproduced with pantones like we print everything cmyk they never actually get used it's more of like a lighthouse or a beacon it's a thing to aim at you can very much pay the extra money to use them it just very rarely happens in my experience if you have just sort of everyday run-of-the-mill clients if you work at like kellogg's again i don't know why i keep going with that example but you have a very specific shade of red that you want to match for your brand on every box then yeah you might have a separate plate that just uses that color but again specialty projects more cost more setup that might happen common projects cmyk you might not ever run into it depends really where you work but the takeaway here is really that these two color modes sort of behave in opposite of each other so rgb when you have zero you get black cmyk when you have a hundred you get black and flip flop for white so just something to keep in mind when you're working in the software we'll get into it more throughout the class that the color mode you're in dictates how the software treats the image it's not just like a setting to choose for when you go to print like it very much determines how the image is processed in the software um as far as rgb is concerned you might be like okay why do we use cyan magenta and yellow when we print but then we use red green and blue when we look at light like it seems like they should at least be the same and it turns out this is just a weird quirk of how humans perceive light we won't get into it because it's bizarre and kind of irrelevant but nonetheless interesting but when your brain perceives red light and green light simultaneously it thinks it's yellow so as far as your brain is concerned there's no difference between a red light and a green light at the same time and yellow it's just you can't stop yourself from seeing it that way and when um computer scientists and engineers and people realize that that's why they built screen based systems on the red green and blue system and we'll i'll show you an example here in a second of kind of how pixels work in relation to that but when you think about separations of either cyan magenta yellow and black or rg and b this would be the part of the in-person class where i would take out a huge print and we would all grab a loop which is one of those um little like jeweler things it's like a handheld magnifying glass and we would all plop a print down on the table and look at it super close and when you zoom in real real close you could actually see the individual dots lining up and you can see kind of how the overall print comes together when you look at something like this it's a bit more abstract like you can see each individual separation but it doesn't quite make sense why they gel together so i was trying to figure out a way to do this in digitally because we can't see each other in person and then i realized this little goober seen here uh dumping dry ice into water for the first time really loves science and has a magnifying glass up in his room so i ran up into his room while he was asleep grabbed the magnifying glass grabbed one of my printouts of from work of a choco flyer and held the magnifying glass in front of my phone and put it toward the flyer and it actually worked so uh thanks to the camera on my google pixel phone uh that's not an advertisement that's just to let you know what i used you can actually see the dot the dot pattern of this printout in this video here and i would encourage you to try it like find a print at home and try to either magnify it or look really close so you can see the dot pattern it's more interesting when you kind of go from the macro view to the micro view to really see how a print is built up close so again here's the video of kind of watching the dot more pattern appear but this is how printing happens you take the individual cyan magenta yellow and black plates print them all individually and the totality of the project produces the final image that's that's a standard offset lithographic print [Music] as far as pixels are concerned uh there's a a great video watch the whole thing down below um but we'll just play a clip here real quick covering kind of how pixels work in relation to this process pixels are an interesting concept because they're not you can't see them very easily but actually if you get a magnifying glass and you go up to a screen you actually can see that your screen is made up of tiny dots of little light what's more interesting is that those tiny dots of little light are actually multiple tiny dots of little light of different colors there's red green and blue pixels together from far away create an image and up front they're just little lights that are on and off and the combination of those create images and what you see on your screen every single day you use your computer so you'll hear the term resolution a lot both in computer science and manufacturers of devices will talk about it resolution is basically it is the dimensions by which you can measure how many pixels are on a screen so back in the day when i was a high school student it was 640 by 480 and today it's a lot bigger and then there's the question not only of resolution but also of density so for instance on modern smartphones they fit the same number of little lights called pixels but in a denser space and it's what allows you to get sharper images [Music] so when you think of it that way pixels are really just a digital version of paper like we we found a way to make the dots instead of be ink that gets pushed onto paper the dots are just always there that's all pixels are there they're fixed dots that can be turned to any color and so with printing you take individual dots of think and lay them down and with screens you take individual dots and just turn them the right color to produce the final image the end result is the same you need individual channels whether that's cyan magenta yellow and black or rg and b to be turned on in sequence to produce a final visual but when you think about them in aggregate together digital and traditional printed or digital versus traditional imaging really isn't that different you both use separate channels for every color both have issues aligning those channels with printing it's called registration trying to line everything up together with digital imaging you frequently get this thing called chromatic aberration which we'll cover where the channels don't line up quite right but all of the same issues appear across both mediums and then both can have dpi or resolution issues and like i mentioned before more pixels or dots more resolution just means better quality but when we start talking about dots and pixels and resolution it invariably leads to the brief discussion about dpi and i always just call this my rant about dpi but let's take a moment and talk about dpi so if you've ever heard this term thrown around dpi stands for dots per inch or ppi sometimes gets used for points or pixels per inch they mean the same thing but dots per inch just refers to the resolution of a photo the reason that this can get confusing is because if you pop open the image dialogue in photoshop you might see something like this where it says the resolution is 72 but then if you watch a video like that other one we watched they might call the resolution of a monitor you know 1920 by 1080. so the word resolution gets used interchangeably for both the number of dots in an image and the overall number of pixels on a screen as far as images are concerned dots and resolution just refers to again the number of individual pieces of anchor the number of individual pixels that you use to represent an image so when we talk about these things i always would ask people like what are the two numbers related to dpi that you know and everybody always says these two 72 is for screen 300 is for print they're taught sort of as gospel like you know woe be the person who violates this sacred rule um but it's really less about this now because um with the way that modern screens have been developed especially like if you refer back to that graphic that the guy threw up in the video there you can have a screen that's 10 inches wide and has 1920 pixels and you can have a little iphone screen that has 1920 pixels so the idea that 72 pixels equals an inch on a screen is not a thing anymore it hasn't been a thing for decades um and especially if you start thinking about the number of different screen resolutions there are out there from ipads to android devices to blackberries even like there's a million different screen resolutions out there and the idea that 72 pixels will always be an inch on all of those devices is just absurd so um when we talk about dpi and we talk about like five pixels per inch or 20 per inch or 300 per inch all of those don't really mean anything when you get into digital devices um and when you get into printing they're kind of irrelevant like 300 is a good thing to aim for but there's nothing sacred about it you could print an image at 299 dpi like nothing would happen uh really the the takeaway is just the less you have the lower the quality that's what you can glean from a dpi number um but when you see these numbers like 72 and 300 um they're really not so much like rules as they are um more like a smoke signal or even a clue so when you pop open a file if you see like a 72 or a 300 that should like key you into something in the process not so much as mean like this has to be used for screen and this has to be used for print that that's not really what it's for um so if we were to open an image pop open the dialog in photoshop and it said resolution 72 we could go okay this was probably meant for a screen maybe not 72 is sort of the default dpi of anything that's taken with a digital camera too so at bare minimum you would know it was either intended for a screen or no one had mucked with it that's all you can really glean from that if the other specs of the document were like 1920 by 1080 and 72 you could go okay that's a standard monitor resolution this very clearly was meant to be displayed full screen on a regular screen so you could take context clues from everything else in the file but if you were to pop open that same image like this and it said 250 dpi then you might be like okay it says it's 1920 by 1080 but clearly someone manipulated the dpi here and their intent probably was to print it because there's no reason that you would turn the dpi up that high if you weren't intending to commit it to paper for some reason because a pixel is a pixel on screen regardless of what the dpi in the file is so when the resolution has been mucked with in this way it usually means print was intended but really the key takeaway for talking about dpi is just a different way of like thinking of it in your brain and what i would sort of give you as an example is just to realize that the p in dpi stands for per like dots per inch it is a calculation of two things how many dots you have and how large you intend to print it um as a unit itself it doesn't really tell you anything i frequently say it would be the same as saying like i live 30 miles per hour from here so as an example uh warning a little bit of math here but it's like super rudimentary basic math so don't freak out and turn your brain off um if you had this image of this little dog and i made it 300 by 300 pixels and we popped it open photoshop and looked at the resolution and set the resolution to 300 it's very obvious that if you have 300 pixels or dots and you print it 300 pixels or dots per inch the image is 1 inch and so by just doing some very simple math you can see that if you printed it two inches wide that would be like taking 300 and dividing it by two so it becomes 100 dp 150 dpi if you printed it three inches wide that would be taking the 300 pixels you have cutting it up into three making it 100 dpi or 100 dots for every inch so on and so forth four inches would be 75 dpi and you could even do this all the way backwards to the point where if you had a 300 pixel image printed 300 inches wide which is like 25 feet you would have one pixel as the resolution it would essentially be one pixel for every inch 300 pixels at 300 inches makes each pixel one inch wide and so you might get kind of into that whole like math lady meme of like whoa numbers but honestly just think of it that way and it becomes very clear like if you have a 300 by 300 pixel image you're like hey i could print that one in wide super high quality maybe it would be something like this using it on the corner of a business card it would look great at the size it's intended if you blew it up to 300 inches wide which would be again about 25 feet on this trailer that came up when i googled 25 feet wide you would then be taking that and making each pixel represent about an inch worth of space and at a distance you're like okay it doesn't look too bad i mean distance here is giving you a little bit of a buffer on how terrible this actually looks but if you walked up close to it it would look like this so each inch would roughly be about a pixel worth of data and it'd be very chewed up and pixelated and gross um and so the the real takeaway there is like an image can really be used at any side any size it's up to you to deem what's passable as far as quality goes so if you know that it's going to be used on a piece of paper that could theoretically be right in front of somebody's face you probably want high dpi if it's a billboard that's you know 400 feet away up in the sky uh lower dpi would be fine no one's going to get up close to that and see how disgusting it looks um billboards are often printed at like 25 or 50 dpi as a result save ink not worry about gigantic massive image sizes so there there's a trade-off there basically you have to do the calculation how many dots do you have and how large are you attempting to print it and what i would sort of ask you to think is if when you're out there in your career and you hear people or clients which you will invariably hear at some point say something like i need a high quality image that's 300 dpi or what do you mean this isn't high enough res the image is 300 dpi or anything where dpi is just thrown out as a figure um try to think of it as the car example like my house is 30 miles an hour from here my car is 30 30 miles an hour like it tells you nothing about the car and it tells you nothing about where you're going the same way that 300 dpi as a raw figure tells you nothing about the image you need to know the inches or the usage in order for it to be useful so to that point if you ever open up an image it isn't that these numbers are useless as i mentioned before it's more of like a smoke signal or a cue to try to give you a hint as to what's going on in the file um and so just as like a quick gut check as to what you can sort of glean from a file if you open it up here's some little quick clues if you open an image and it says it's 72 dpi you can either assume it's meant for a screen or no one has touched it because 72 is the default resolution that phones and cameras and all this stuff capturing so at bare minimum 72 either means it was meant for a screen or no one has mucked with it and if it's a raw asset it's it's usually the latter like it just means it hasn't been touched yet if you open up a file and the dpi is for some reason less than 72 that usually means someone did mess with it and they didn't know what they were doing so if you open it up and it's 40 or 35 or something weird or one someone did something wrong in photoshop saved it on accident and they goofed i've never had a file that's below 72 that was done intentionally if you open up a file and it's some multiple of 72 so you know 72 once twice three times anything like that 144 216 288 that is indicative of some sort of mobile usage uh we won't get into it in the nitty gritty here but when you deploy assets on mobile devices you frequently have 1x 2x 3x sizes of graphics and so those numbers are 1x 2x 3x multiples of 72. so those would just sort of key you into the fact that somebody was doing something with a mobile implementation and it might be worth either doing further investigation or ferreting out what your usage would be and how those numbers would affect it and then lastly if you see anything that seems like a very human rounded number um you know a 300 a half of that has 150 or anything clean like 100 200 300 600 1200 anything that kind of seems like a human just wanted a nice clean variation of 300 it probably was meant for print even if it's a hundred and it seems like it's closer to 72 very rarely would people use 72 for print because it just the likelihood of it working out that that number of pixels with the size you're using it being exactly 72 is pretty much zero so if you see something like in a 100 or 200 to 300 it probably means they were conceding the point that they didn't have enough dpi to print it at 300 but they still wanted it to look kind of nice and they bumped it up a smidge 100 200 300 any sort of human readable round number it probably means it was meant for print at some point in its life um so anyway you know that was kind of a quick divergence into weird dpi land but just know that like the reason we were talking about it is because it it all involves dots resolution and the replication of uh imagery and that's sort of the key common point across digital devices printing any sort of uh replication of imaging whether that's traditional or digital digital media and that sort of commonality just means that all of these what we seem to have as new issues regarding pixel density and rgb on screens and all the all this stuff that we're trying to figure out to match color and registration and all of that on phones is just some more modern version of an issue we already figured out for printing so you know registration chromatic aberration all these things are just happening on screens now instead of on paper um the the second point here i just call the two w's which is uh kind of like the five w's of who what one where why um who who what when where why yeah those five um and generally speaking the two w's you need to know about any printing technology are just when and why so knowing when to use something and why you would want to go down that path is usually enough to get you there you don't need to know all the other stuff about like who invented it when it was invented where it was invented you know how it gets used all of that stuff will be involved by or taken care of by somebody more sort of technologically knowledgeable in the process at the printing place but if you have enough knowledge to say like i would like to use flexo and here's why that's enough to get you far enough down the path and then lastly if it walks like a duck that old adage is just like if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it's probably a duck same sort of thing is true here if you can identify you know two or three attributes about your project the printing method will present itself so you don't need to know all of this stuff about flexo and litho and whatever it's like if your project is for food packaging and it needs accurate color and it's in high quantities it's like okay it's either flex or reviewer probably has pms colors because you want to match the color well and the quantity is going to determine mass printing so it's clearly not like a digital scenario or something knowing those three things produces the method that needs to use it you know low quantities low number of colors and it's going on a shirt probably screen printing uh one or two copies needs to be on paper and you need it tomorrow digital printing so just knowing sort of the the quantity of the print the colors you're going to use really sort of spits out your final need so you know if it walks like flexo and talks like flexo it's probably flex though so just just know that having some very high level attributes uh memorized about those things will give you enough that you need to kind of proceed and seek a more technical solution from someone else okay so that's it uh the phone overheated at one point and i recorded this in all different chucks hopefully it was clear hopefully it all makes sense uh shoot me any questions over email if you're on youtube do youtube stuff uh the pandemics really twisted me and knots here with how to address all of you so see you at the next one hope it was helpful ask me questions if you need to bye