What are the elements of the printing process?

Conventional printing must have the original, printing plates, substrates, printing inks, printing machinery, and the five elements in order to print.

1, the original. In the field of printing, the plate is based on the physical or carrier graphic information called the original. Because the original manuscript is the basis for printing. Therefore, the quality of the original manuscript directly affects the quality of the finished print. Before printing, be sure to select and produce the original suitable for plate making, and printing, to ensure that the printed product meets quality standards.

Printing originals are generally divided into three categories: text originals, image originals, and physical originals.

① text manuscript: also divided into handwritten manuscript, print manuscript, copy manuscript, etc. The original manuscript on the shape of the word to be correct, the handwriting should be clear, awake, and thick ink.

② image original: and divided into original drawings and original photographs.The original drawing lines in the original and continuous tone original.

By black and white or colored lines composed of graphics, no shades of change in the original manuscript are called the original line manuscript. Some of the originals in this category are handwritten text, art lettering, diagrams, pen drawings, woodcuts, prints, maps, etc.

The original that has a continuous gradation in the intensity from the highlights to the darker parts of the picture is called a continuous tone original. These are watercolor paintings, gouache paintings, oil paintings, Chinese paintings, annual paintings, drawings, pencil drawings, etc.

Among these originals, some are transmissive originals and some are reflective originals. A transmissive original is an original with transparent material as the carrier of graphic information, and the light source is directed from the back of the original during plate making, using its transmitted light for work. The reflective original is the opposite of the transmissive original, which uses opaque material as the carrier of graphic information, and the plate is made by the reflection of light on the color of the original.

There are transmission and reflection originals in photo originals, both of which are in black and white and color. Color reflective originals, that is, color photographs, are expanded from the color negative, the contrast is lower than the color positive film, and the color is not as vivid as the color positive film.

Black and white reflective original is generally black and white photos, the image is the positive image of the subject, rich in layers, moderate contrast, and can be enlarged by black and white photographic negative or printed.

Color transmission originals have positive and negative films. The color-positive film is generally called the natural color-positive film, its image is the positive image of the subject. The color is the same as the subject, and the color positive's light-sensitive layer is coated on a transparent film base, so the image is observed with transmitted light. The image of the color-positive film is bright and colorful, rich in layers, and good in clarity. It can be directly photographed with natural color reversal film, obtained by the development process, or copied with natural color negative film. The color negative is the natural color negative, its image is the inverse of the subject, and the subject's light and dark degrees are exactly the opposite, and the subject colors each other as a complementary color. Because the contrast coefficient of color negative film is small, the contrast of the color transparent image formed is also low, and the color is complementary to the color of the object, so it is not as easy as the natural color positive film to correctly judge the image when observing. The original photo requires rich layers, high image clarity, appropriate contrast, a color draft without color deviation, and appropriate magnification when copying.

③Physical original: the physical as the basis for plate making, nowadays, generally will be photographed into the original photo and then plate making.