Just\n recently I\u2019ve been working with a client who needed to a booklet by the\n cheapest means they could so they elected to print the majority of it \nin black in white. To be helpful they sent me the file converted to gray\n and when I sent the proof back they were surprised that the look of the\n pages had changed, their grays had become lighter or darker than \nexpected. When I explained that their grays are colours and not shades \nof black they were fine with it and we printed the job. I thought this \nmonth would be a good time to talk about the nature of black only \nprinting and how gray is a colour not a shade of black. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One\n of the feature that makes Copy Express stand out from our competitors \nis that we do offer a black only printing option on all the work do. Now\n note how I use the words \u2018black only\u2019. Black only means that when we \nprint only the colour black is used to put an image on the page and not \nthe cyan, yellow or magenta. Because we are only using one colour and \nour printer can work at a higher speed, it costs us less to print each \npage and we pass that saving on you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\n people think of as black and white images, from old photos or films are\n aren\u2019t actually black and white – they are a range of different \nintensities of black from nothing (white) to solid (black). The middle \nrainbow of the picture is an example of that difference intensities. \n High volume CYMK printers like we use don\u2019t have that ability to have \nthat ability to change intensity of their colour. Every dot on the \nprinted pages it is either one of the four or nothing. The reason why we\n can get such a range of colours is that every visible dot you can see \non the page is actually made up of a grid of much finer dots where the \ndifferent choices of the \u20185\u2019 colours are blended to give you a range of \nshades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How\n does this affect your printing when you select the black only option? \nSimply put where before every visible dot had 16 to the power of 5 \npossible patterns to make a colour (1,048,576), now the printer has only\n 16 to the power of 2 (256) ways of making a shade. In real terms there \nnumber of combination for full colour and black only printing much much \nlower so you get about 16,000 shades where black only accounts about 8 \nof them. The result of this is that the range of tones becomes a lot \ncruder and colours which are very different in CYMK become identical in \nblack only. The lowest of the rainbows gives an example of what can \nhappen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what to do about it if you want to print colourful material in black only with us at Copy Express? If you don\u2019t want to go through the hassle of making a document truly black only, you don\u2019t have too. Our systems are designed to \u2018intelligently\u2019 convert colours in the a suitable black tone, often adjusting \u2018colours\u2019 to keep a good contrast. Also we are more than happy to print sample pages in the black only mode for your inspection and even send you scans of them so you can verify the look before telling us to print. We will work with you in adjusting your designs to get the best from black only print. This is why you come to Copy Express because we are here to help you. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just recently I\u2019ve been working with a client who needed to a booklet by the cheapest means they could so they elected to print the majority of it in black in white. To be helpful they sent me the file converted to gray and when I sent the proof back they were surprised that the … Continue reading “Technical Terms Explained – Gray is a colour”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,74,25,15,24,34,32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1582,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions\/1582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.copyexpress.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}