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How Four-Color Printing Works

The Daily Illini and Buzz are all printed using CMYK process color. Though there are many steps to the process, in short, our digital files are transferred to printing plates, which are then used to print onto the newspaper. Four plates are created, one for each color: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, or CMYK. (For a detailed look at the process, please visit How Stuff Works.)

Because newsprint is very absorbent and flexible, the images laid down by the four plates can sometimes have alignment issues, and if quite a bit of ink is laid down, the paper can become over-saturated, which will cause the images to become very dark and blurry. However, if you understand the effects of newsprint, you can work with it to get good results.

Below, we've described some of our processes for making newsprint work. If you are making your own ads, please take a few minutes to read through our suggestions, and download some of our presets and actions to help you along.

If you have any questions, contact your ad rep, and they will be able to assist you.

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Working With Color

The key to working with color on newsprint is to not lay down too much ink. The more ink you lay down, the darker your image will become, due to ink spread. You should try to keep your colors as light as possible, and try to create colors using as few primary colors as possible. We've outlined a specific example with creating a good blue below.

Regarding Illini Blue

I-L-L. I-N-I. As you can imagine, we use a lot of blue in our color ads. Blue is a tricky on newsprint, though, so we have a few suggestions on how to create a nice blue.

We've found that creating a blue by mixing cyan and black works very well on newsprint. InDesign's default blue swatch creates a blue by mixing cyan and magenta, which can look rather purple in print. By mixing primarily cyan and black, as seen in Figure 1, the blue will really pop.

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A Special Note Regarding Rich Black

In four-color CMYK printing, it's possible to create a blacker shade of black. This shade is called rich black, and it's produced by combining ink from all 4 plates to create a very dense, inky black. On glossy paper, it gives a richer, more opaque black than the normal black produced from only one plate.

However, on an absorbent material like newsprint, you should avoid rich black as if it were a swarm of bees. Since this black uses all 4 plates, the process puts down a lot of ink, leading to blurry, smudged text and muddy illustrations. There's several settings you can use in Adobe's Creative Suite to control what sort of black you produce.

Rich Black In Illustrator and InDesign

It's very easy to set up InDesign and Illustrator to create a newspaper-friendly black. Simply go to Preferences, then select Appearance of Black. Then, set the Printing/Exporting option to Output All Blacks Accurately, as seen below.

Controlling Black In Photoshop

Unfortunately, Photoshop loves rich black, and you have to wrestle it to get a low-density, newprint-friendly black. By default, Photoshop produces a black as seen in Figure 3, which is very dense and will cause problems on newspaper.

For best results, set your document color mode to CMYK by going to the Image menu, selecting Mode, and clicking CMYK. Then, manually create a black in the color palette as seen in Figure 3. 

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On Reverse Type

Putting white type on a color background can by stylish, but you need to carefully select your colors to insure proper reproduction.

As mentioned before, four-color printing works by laying down ink from four plates. On newsprint, which is very absorbent and stretchy, this is a finnicky process, and there are often problems with registration, or the alignment of the color plates. When registration problems occur, fields of color can show primary color fringes at the borders.

This can be a big problem with text. If you want to put white text on a color background, try to create colors that have as little ink as possible, and try to use as few colors as possible. For example, if you're placing white text on a blue background, try to set up the colors as seen in Figure 4 below.

Your type choices can have an effect on reproduction, too. Sans-serif typefaces, such as Helvetica, tend to reproduce much more clearly than serif typefaces, such as Times. Sans-serf fonts usually have simpler forms and bolder strokes, which makes them more resistant to ink spread. Also, try to keep your type size above 12 points; anything smaller and fine details can become blurry.

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Preparing Photographs For Print

Photographs, as they are continuous tone images that use all four plates, require some special care to ensure proper reproduction on newsprint.

Without proper correction, photos will print significantly darker in the newspaper than they appear on your monitor. To correct for this, we've created an action that you can use in Photoshop CS2 and later that will automatically convert your RGB photos to CMYK and apply a correction curve appropriate for our newspaper. You can find the download in the next section.

Please note that photos corrected via this method will look a little strange on screen, as they will be very light. However, since the photos will darken by about 30% in print, be assured, they're supposed to look like that. Please see the figure on the right for a quick example.

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Downloads and Links

Our first download is a pair of actions for Photoshop CS3 and later that will optimize your photos for printing in the newspaper. Download the ZIP file, open it, and then double-click on the .atn file to load the actions into Photoshop. 

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Our ad presets include InDesign templates (for InDesign CS2 or later) for broadsheet, tabloid, classified, and booklet publications. Flash CS4 templates are also included for animated ad sizes.