A lot of our subscribers complain about dull colors of their ads in newspaper. The design looks great on computer screen and on sample print printed with office desktop printer, but looks completely washed off in newspaper. This happens because newspaper print has following characteristics:
a) Newspaper have very low print resolution. Your desktop printer prints at 300+ DPI resolution, but newspapers roughly print at 100 DPI resolution. So while your print may show very clear image the newspaper print won’t be able to match it.
b) Newspaper printing has 20%+ dot gain. Which means basically that when you put a dot of ink on the paper used for printing newspapers, the ink of that dot expands to take at least 20% extra space from neighboring dots.
c) Finally, newspapers use halftone printing with CMYK inks to generate mixed colors. So if the desired mixed color has almost equal ratio of CMYK then there are not be enough dots in low resolution printing to reproduce the desired color.
So what can be done? Follow these three simple rules:
1) First, of course use high contrast in your designs because low newspaper print quality will mix the low contrast boundaries.
2) Design your ads using CMYK colorspace and not RGB. RGB colors do not translate same(visually) to CMYK. Since newspapers use CMYK inks to print, using CMYK in your designs will have best changes to match your design in print.
3) When using mixed colors keep one of the CMYK component towards 100%. This helps in reducing the colors mismatch due to low resolution halftoning.
If you still have problems, call us for assistance with your designs!
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