How a photo becomes a halftone for printing
This shows you a small part of a video in which a person converts a
photo into a halftone image for ordinary printing in a magazine or
newspaper. Don't worry about the specific actions he's taking with
Photoshop, this isn't here for you
to learn that software. The important thing here is just for you to see
how the continuously varying light intensity of a photo is converted
into dots of varying size. When printed in the same way that text is placed
onto paper
by a printing press the image is reproduced; not in color and not as
well defined as in a
photo, but recognizable. The smaller the dot pattern chosen the greater
the
resolution. To print in color, four dot images of the photo are formed,
one for each of the
CYMK colors (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black).
Click on the video to view it... (about 1 minute in length)
How images are printed in color with "color separations" Here is what the color separations of an image look like in the simple
CYM scheme
and also in the four-color CYMK process. In both schemes the
separations are printed
on top of each other to form the full color image at the top of the
illustration.
The CYMK process uses less colored ink; since black is printed in black
ink, the black
in the image does not require the colors cyan, yellow, and magenta to
be formed.
