Printing Near Me / CMYK Online Print Shop
What does CMYK stand for?
The CMYK acronym stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key. Those are the four colours used in the printing process. All colours in CMYK printing are created by combining different percentages of those four colours.
‘Key’ in this context stands for black. It’s named 'Key' because it is the main colour used in the printing process to provide depth, contrast and shading. The other three CMY colours create the colour difference on the spectrum depending on the percentage of each that is mixed.
How does CMYK printing work?
First you need to
understand a little about how a printing press works. To set up or 'make
ready' the press the images are transferred to metal plates and the ink
applied to these plates. They are then used to transfer the ink to
rubber sheets and it's these sheets that are used to transfer the image
to the paper or card. It sounds complicated, and it is to a certain
extent, but the important thing to know is that this is the time
consuming part of printing and it needs to be done for each and every
different print job.
How to save money by printing CMYK items together?
We put several jobs together on the one press, like various business cards
for example in the illustration above, we only need to do this 'make
ready' once, but we get several completed print runs out of it. This
saves us time and we pass this saving on to you with cheaper high quality CMYK printing.
Why print CMYK collectively with PrintTogether?
Not
only does this method help our customers to save money, it's better for
the environment too. By printing several jobs on one set up we reduce
the amount of plates, paper, ink, energy and water we use and the amount
of waste we produce.
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