Some customers asked us, is it better to use CMYK printing or Pantone printing for catalogue printing? For this problem, we need to know what is CMYK printing and Pantone printing.

The simple understanding of CMYK printing is to use the colors of yellow, magenta, cyan, and black ink, and achieve the desired effect through a certain proportion of the adjustment. The printing process of copying the original color is to use the three primary colors of red, yellow and blue. It is a lithographic printing method that realizes color reproduction with black pigment (ink or dye) according to the principle of subtractive color mixing. In addition, CMYK printing is dot printing. If you open the content of the album with a magnifying glass, you will find that it is composed of dots. So how is the color adjusted? For example, blue is adjusted like this, CMYK printing system = (cyan C100 magenta M100 yellow Y0 black K0). The advantage of the CMYK for catalogue printing is the color is rich. The disadvantage is fineness is will have color error.

The simple understanding of Pantone printing is the printing process of copying the original color with inks of other colors except for the four colors of yellow, magenta, cyan, and black ink. Sometimes the background of the picture book we designed will have a large area of background color (for example, the background of the inner page is a large block of blue), and the Pantone printing process is often used to print a large area of color block in the picture book printing. The advantage is that the printing precision is high, do not want to have dots in the CMYK printing, the disadvantage is the printed colors are not rich enough.

For catalogue printing, CMYK printing and Pantone printing should be used reasonably according to the actual situation. For example, in the following catalogue, the blue and purple colors are printed in Pantone color, while the logo and other parts are printed in CMYK colors.

The color of the ink prepared by Pantone printing according to the principle of subtractive color mixing of the color material has low color brightness and high saturation. The solid foundation with uniform ink color is printed in Pantone. When the ink volume is increased appropriately, the thickness of the ink layer will be less sensitive to color changes. Therefore, it is easier to get a uniform and thick printing effect.

Adopt CMYK printing color blocks. Because the various colors of the color block are mostly composed of a certain proportion of dots. When printing dots, the thickness of the ink layer must be strictly controlled. Or it is easy to produce large color difference due to the change of the thickness of the ink layer.