Planning your job, and designing for it, you have to take into consideration not
just your choice of ink, but how that ink's going to look on the final stock.
And here I'm showing you Pantone 1915 on coated stock and uncoated stock.
It's exactly the same ink. The difference in appearance is just the
way the ink behaves when it hits the paper.
So, you're going to find that colors are more vibrant on coated stock, usually
coated stock is going to be a little brighter.
You know, it's a little bit shiny, and so that light that's coming back up through
the ink makes for a brighter color. And then ink is going to be absorbed a
little bit into uncoated stock. So, that's going to mean that it's
duller, sometimes it's lighter. And you don't have the light reflecting
off it, the color is not as strong. Again that's exactly the same ink.
And I want to underscore that when I, I point out to you that when you start to
pick your colors in Illustrator or InDesign.
When you look down through the list you'll see Solid Coated and Solid
Uncoated, and you'll also see Color Bridge Coated, Color Bridge Uncoated and
so forth. The coated and uncoated of course are
referring ot the paper. But I've already pointed out that the ink
is exactly the same ink. So, why are there two libraries?
Well, it's because Illustrator and InDesign, are trying to mimic, onscreen,
how the ink is going to look different on coated versus uncoated stock.
So, you'll see that it looks a little duller if you pick an uncoated.
It looks a little brighter, a little stronger color if you pick the coated.
Again, it's trying to mimic onscreen what it's going to look like.
You don't really know what it's going to look like until you see an ink draw down,
or you see the job on press. Or after you've run a few jobs, you get
sort of a sense of how the ink's going to look on paper versus how it's displayed onscreen.
But if you have your heart set on a particular color, and you want something
that's really strong and vibrant, you should take into consideration that
you're probably going to have better results if you use coated stock.
It might cost a little bit more to run, but it means that you're going to get
that color that you had your heart set on.
So, remember it's sort of an equation, not just the ink you pick, but it's also
the stock that, that ink's going to print on.