Trapping
Tutorial
Chokes and Spreads Fill the Gaps
Let lighter colors expand into darker colors.
In
order to compensate for minor misalignments on the printing
press you need to slightly overlap your touching colors. Then,
if one color shifts slightly you won't get a white space (or
whatever color your paper is) between colors.
Choke
and Spread are similar terms used to describe the process
of intentionally overlapping touching colors. Which is which?
First, a
general rule of thumb is:
Lighter colors expand into darker colors.
The reason for this is that, to the eye, changes
to the darker objects are more noticeable than the slight changes
to the lighter object. To determine whether you are applying
a choke or a spread will depend on the direction of the color
overlap.
In the illustration on this page we use dark
blue and pink. The green represents where the pink overlaps
the dark blue.
In first example the lighter pink spreads into
the darker blue background color. In second example the lighter
pink background color chokes the darker blue object in the middle.
The exact terms are less important than understanding
which color needs to be overlapped. With multiple overlapping
objects it can get tricky.
What
actually happens is that one color ends up printing over the
other. The slight overlap of color, if done properly, won't
be particularly noticeable. If it does get out of register on
the press, the extra allowance of pink will keep a white gap
from appearing.
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