1.Spot color printing (Pantone) refers to a printing process that uses inks of colors other than yellow, magenta, cyan, and black inks to replicate the colors of the original.

The spot color printing process is often used in packaging printing to print a large area of ​​background color. The spot color printing is a single color, no gradient, the pattern is solid, and the dots cannot be seen with a magnifying glass. (Generally speaking, the cost of spot color printing is slightly higher)
Four-color printing (CMYK) is the color you need by using CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) four-color overprinting. In layman's terms, that is to use the different superposition of these 4 colors to get the color you need. As long as the color has a gradient, it is printed in four colors. Four-color printing is superimposed by dots. You can see different colors with a magnifying glass. Of outlets.

2.What product needs four-color printing?
 

In general, photos taken by color photography that reflect the colorful changes of colors in nature, expressions of characters, art works of painters, or other pictures containing many different colors. Due to technological requirements or economic considerations, it must be scanned by an electronic color separation machine or a color desktop system. Then use the four-color printing process to replicate.

What kind of products will use spot color printing?
Some packaging products or the covers of books and magazines and picture albums are often composed of uniform color blocks of different colors or regular gradient color blocks and text. These color blocks and text can be separated and printed with four primary colors. You can mix spot color inks, and then print only one spot color ink on the same color block. In the case of comprehensive consideration of improving printing quality and saving overprinting times, spot color printing is often used. Packaging printing often uses spot colors to print large areas of background colors.

3. What is the difference between spot color printing and four-color overprinting?
 

Spot color printing has low color brightness and high saturation; spot color blocks with uniform ink color are usually printed in solid, and the ink volume should be increased appropriately. When the ink layer thickness of the layout is large, the change of the ink layer thickness will affect the color change. The sensitivity will be reduced, so it is easier to get a uniform and thick printing effect.

    The color blocks printed by the four-color printing process are likely to change the color intensity due to changes in the thickness of the ink layer and changes in the printing process conditions. Changes in the degree of dot expansion, resulting in a change in color. Therefore, it is not easy to achieve the uniform ink color effect with the color blocks printed by the four-color printing process.

    From the perspective of economic benefits, it is mainly to see whether the use of spot color printing technology can save the number of overprints. Because reducing the number of overprints can not only save printing costs, but also save the cost of prepress production. If the picture of a certain product has both a color gradation picture and a large area background color, the color gradation picture part can be printed in four colors, and the large area background color can be printed in spot colors.

4.Spot color ink: Refers to a pre-mixed specific color ink, such as fluorescent yellow, pearl blue, metallic gold and silver ink, etc. It is not printed by CMYK four-color overlay. Color registration means accurate color. It has the following three characteristics:
 

1 accuracy
Each color register has its own fixed hue, so it can ensure the accuracy of the color in printing, thereby largely solving the problem of color transfer accuracy.

2 On-site
Spot colors generally use solid colors to define colors, no matter how light the color is. Of course, the spot color can also be screened (Tint) to present any shades of the spot color.

3 Wide performance color gamut
The color gamut in the chromatic color library is very wide, which exceeds the performance gamut of RGB, not to mention the CMYK color space. Therefore, a large part of the colors cannot be presented with CMYK four-color printing inks.