Quality & Service for Print & Promotional Products

Artwork & Design

 

Colour

Colour settings cause more problems than any other aspect of digital documents.

Technical Information

Some applications let you have control over your colours and others do not. If you use an application which does allow you to control the colour, it's important that you use this correctly to specify the colours you require. If, however, you use a program which does not allow you any control, then you do not have to worry as this can normally by corrected by ourselves. However, in some cases exact colour matching can not be guaranteed.

4 Programs which do allow you control over your colours include:

QuarkXPress
PageMaker
Illustrator
CorelDraw
Photoshop

 

7 Programs which do not allow you control over your colours include:

Microsoft Publisher

Microsoft Powerpoint

Microsoft Word

 

First of all decide on, what colour model your artwork will use. The options are:

- Black only 
- Four colour process

 

Four colour process is the usual way of creating a colour document. It allows the creation of virtually all the colours that our eyes can see, except for some bright colours such as oranges and greens.

Once you have decided what option you will use, you can start to define colours in your document. See below for specific advice relating to different colour models.

Black only:

Photographs must be greyscale, or black and white.
As black is the only ink being used, the document can only have black and all the tints of black from 100% (black) to 0% (white).

Four colour process:

Full colour photographs may be used with this colour model.
All colours in the document must be specified as being process (not spot). Colours should either be made up by choosing a Pantone® colour and converting it to process, or by choosing CMYK values.

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