5 Color Printing?

[MarkTonk]

Trapping Gold Metallic requires a finer trap thickness then you would use for regular ink trapping. The Gold Metallic ink has a tendency to spread out more on its own compared to regular ink. Good luck!

Regards,

Mark

[Lammy]

typically metallics are KOd because of that spread. Some of us put smaller traps on though. . . you know how pressman can be

MetalFX has a system that allows you to print process over metallics for some pretty neat effect.

I know we've done some process over silver jobs in the past. Print the spot silver plus a varnish, let it dry, come back the next day and print the process. Just gotta watch how wet it the process is. I ever get another on of them monsters I'm gonna suggest oxybind inks.

[Techboy]

Hmm, someone came up with the idea of using gold metallic color and blending it within a 4-color image to give it a rich-warm look is that even possible with gold being opaque? Is it possible to replace say the blue (or any other color) channel with a PMS metallic gold?

[born2print]

Originally Posted by Techboy

Hmm, someone came up with the idea of using gold metallic color and blending it within a 4-color image to give it a rich-warm look is that even possible with gold being opaque? Is it possible to replace say the blue (or any other color) channel with a PMS metallic gold?

AHA! It always devolves down to the difficulty of creating and handling a 5/c Photoshop file. MetalFX is an awesome product that "does it for you" we did 1 job using it and it looked great.

Beware the opacity and ink trap (not prepress trapping) issues of metallics combined with conventional inks. Beside KOs and fine traps, you can "dry pass off line" (IOW run through the press twice, once for 4/c then dry, then again for metallic)

[prepress_vee]

Calling David... come in David..
He should be able to drop a fat knowledge bomb on this topic.
I'm pretty sure they do a lot of custom metallic effects & cmyk on the regular.

They did a really cool GAM or American Printer cover with the Swiss Army Knife on it - it used cmyk + spot red i think + metallics - it was very sharp.
Let me see if I can find him......

[born2print]

If I sounded like a vent, I'm not surprised, I get a phone call every couple of weeks where someone wants me "to spend a couple of minutes walking them through making a 5 or 6 color photoshop file"
I usually go with " give us what you have, tell us what you want and let us handle it for you!

[David]

what is all the racket out here...

I'm tryin to sleep!!!


Oh, printing metallic over 4c, yeah we do that, almost on a daily basis...


If your printing a solid of metallic with your 4 color, you may want to lay the metallic down first on press, and if you have the units, put some space between the metallic and the cmyk.
We like to integrate the metallic with the four color here by building a fifth channel and using a little photoshop magic (take some color out and replace it with the metallic color).
For instance, if your wanting to use a gold metallic with your four color to say enhance a gold Rolex watch. You would remove some magenta and some yellow in the area that has the "gold" look, and then generate a channel (sometimes just dupe a channel that has most of what you need and massage it to get what you want) that would replace the missing color with the gold. And like I said before, we usually lay the metallic down first and put the 4c on top. Of course, you have to deal with the ink trapping like Mark and born2 said, otherwise it will turn to mush real quick.
It does require some color knowledge and some hefty photoshop work, but is not hard once you get it down.

not for the faint hearted, but it's something that when done right, will look very nice and the custy will go "WOW"!

here's a link to our web site for some other info.

hope this helps,
David


PS.
thanks Vee for waking me up!

[prepress_vee]

uh oh.... I woke the sleeping giant of prepress!!



RUN!!!!!!!!!!

[prepress_vee]

Thanks David.
I knew you had a little knowledge bomb for us.
Vee

[Techboy]

OMG! You are a God David!

This is exactly the solution I was thinking about. Although I must admit, I didn't think about removing some colors from both Magenta and Yellow channels and was only thinking about replicating a single channel that won't be overwhelm with gold. Nor was I thinking about laying down the metallic gold down first and printing 4-color on top.

In short, this sound like a job that can only be prep correctly at press? I don't think I can trust an outside designer (or even myself) to setup the files consistency nor correctly since I won't see any ink trapping problems on screen.

This is $$$ information! Thank you!