CMYK plus WHITE printing for dark coloured swing tags

We’re going to get a bit technical now, but bare with us as it’s worth knowing!

For decades the print industry has been largely reliant on a certain print processes for producing media in large quantities, this process is known as CMYK. If you own a printer and have had to fill it with ink, you’ll know that it comes with different ink or toner cartridges, CMYK cartridges more than often. This stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black). All print you see is usually made from combining these colours to create realistic photos.

There, not so difficult is it… but here goes.

When you print onto white substrates such as paper, the CMYK inks combine with the white to create the colour gamut necessary to create photographs and represent colours correctly. If you print onto a colour other than white, such as dark blue, you’re adding that colour into the process and disastrous results appear! You need to print a white under-base to achieve the same result as the white paper.

Luckily technology has moved on, we now have printers that have a CMYK+W cartridge system and we’ve bought into this technology. Prior to a few years ago you had printers that could print white toner, but you had to print that first by swapping one of the cartridges out, then print the colour on-top. This led to registration errors, where colour and white do not sit neatly on-top of each other creating a white halo.

This is why we are experts in our field, we acknowledge the limitations of the current technology and work to prevent these terrible prints getting into clients hands.