The AQA (our examining board) specifies the following:

‡Quality checks such as colour registration marks, position marks.

‡Commercial printing methods- letterpress, lithography, flexography, gravure and
screen printing.
‡Varnishing (oil, spirit, UV and water).
‡Laminating, embossing and foil application.
‡Multiple surface developments (nets) produced by die cutters and creasing bars.

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 The five main types of printing are:
Relief- Letterpress, Block printing, Flexography (foil blocking)

Planographic (flat plate printing)- Lithography & offset lithography

Intaglio (etching) ± Gravure, Screen Printing

Xenography (dry printing)- Photocopying, Laser printing, commercial digital printing

   
 
  
   
 
      
 

   !"

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 Flexography
Flexography is a form of  (a raised profile) printing.
The image is slightly raised, inked and the printed straight onto the "
(technical term for paper, card or whatever is being printed on).
The plate is usually made from soft rubber or plastic and uses a quick drying ink.
This high speed process is well suited to a number of materials such as acetate
film, polyethylene (eg supermarket bags), brown paper and newsprint.
For more information visit:
http://graphics.tech.uh.edu/MatProcesses/Flexography.html

# 



"" 
 

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 sffset Lithography
sffset Lithography is by far the most common form of commercial printing. It accounts for
over 70 % of commercial printing.
sffset lithography works on a very simple principle: oil and water don¶t mix. Images (words
and art) are put on plates which are damped first by water the by oil-based ink. The ink
sticks to the image area , the water to the non-image area which absorb moisture and
repel ink. Then the image is transferred to a rubber roller and then to the substrate. This
happens at an extremely fast speed as the plates are wrapped around a roller. The paper
is web fed (a continuous roll).

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 !hat happens inside«

An offset lithography machine has four of these presses, printing the

cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CYMK) components of a print.

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Advantages of offset lithography:
‡ Prints 4 colours onto flat materials
‡ It is a high quality process
‡ Very economical on medium to large production runs 500 - 500,000
‡ It is a fast process ± speeds of up to 50,000 presses per hour can be acheived on
a web ± fed press!

Disadvantages of offset lithography

‡ Less economic than rotogravure and flexography on high volume printing
1,000,000+
‡ Less economic than digital printing on small to medium runs 50 -100,000(although
quality is slightly higher)
‡ Limited to the type of materials it can print onto ± the surface must be flat. Litho
would not be accurate enough for newspaper print.

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 Gravure
Gravure is a printing process that uses intaglio or engraved metal plates or cylinders.
The image to be printed is photo-etched onto the plate as microscopic dots.
Rotogravure is a printing technique characterised by high print quality and large
numbers of copies ± hundreds of thousands or even many millions. Tiny ink volumes
are transferred from the gravure printing cylinder to printing dots on the paper. Millions
of printing dots show up to the human eye as letters/text or images

The "doctor blade" is

angled against the cylinder
to wipe away the excess
ink, leaving ink only in the
cell wells

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The main application of gravure covers a wide range of commercial products.
Gravure is especially suited to work in the four colour process on relatively
cheap papers in quantities over 250,000. The reason being the expense of the
original printing plates which can each run into thousands of pounds.

Example applications include

‡ magazines
‡ mail-order
‡ catalogues
‡ Board packaging products such as folding box cartons for food and cigarette
industries, also printed video cases.
‡ Flexible packaging such as printed cellophane and polythene used in food
wrapping, display and production.

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Advantages of Gravure:

‡ It can be used for the highest quality reproductions

‡ It uses lower grade, lighter paper than lithography
‡ High speed usually 6000-10,000 prints per hour
‡ Automatic registration.

Disadvantages of gravure
‡ Initial cost of rotogravure plates extremely high therefore it is only economic for
very high print runs

‡ Colour correction is difficult

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 Silk Screen Printing
Screen Printing is unlike any other process as it uses a stencil through which ink is
pushed. The process involves forcing ink through a fine mesh (screen) which helps to
spread the ink evenly.

‡Its easy to use, versatile and requires low

capital investment.

‡Relatively cheap ± on short and medium print

runs ± automated presses which can print,
varnish or gum up to 6000 per hour.

‡Most importantly it can print onto curvrd and

uneven surfaces

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The main stages of modern print production
origination

compostion
Prepress Colour separation

Plate production

sheet or web fed

print 4 colour printing

Quality control

Stiching binding stapling

Embossing, blocking
Finishing Varnish and laquer

Die cutting and

creasing

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 The main stages of modern print production
The basic stages of modern print production are:

1. sriginal artwork ± photographs, illustrations and text ± are scanned and entered
into a computer

2. These elements are combined into a document using page makeup or desktop
publishing software

3. Full size films are output using a high-resolution imagesetter. These could be
either positives or negatives.

4. Printing plates are made from films using a photochemical process

5. The flexible plates are attached to the plate cylinders of a litho press and the job is
printed.

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 Full Colour Printing
For printing, and image is separated into its
colours Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black
(CMYK).
Each colour is printed over the other as the
paper (or substrate) moves through the
presses. Each colour has its own press.

Cyan magenta yellow black

# 
   
micro.magnet.fsu.edu/.../primarycolors/
colorseparation/

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 Quality Control
The two main quality checks are:
‡Registration
‡Colour Density

Registration can be checked by either eye or

automatically and are used to check that the 4
processes are aligned properly on the substrate.
Images out of alignment can appear blurred.
$  " %&'  

Colour density is checked using a Densitometer,

which is a hand held device that measures the
density of colour.

The densitometer is held over the colour bar (one

colour for each of the process colours and
greyscale.

  
!"

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 Binding
snce printed the next stage is the binding of the product. The bindery is where the
printed product is completed. The huge rolls of now-printed paper are cut and put
together so that pages fall in the correct order. Pages are also bound together by,
staples or glue, in this step of the process.
A machine called a stitcher takes the folded printed paper (called press signatures)
and collates them together.

The final components in the stitcher machine are the knives which trim the paper to its final delivered size.



  "  
!

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 Cutting and Folding (creasing)
Most cartons (packages, boxes) require cut outs and creases in order for them to be
assembled. The machine tool used on modern presses is the die cutter.

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