 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
» Home » Graphics What
is Trapping? What is trapping? Have you ever looked at a printed piece and noticed that one of the colors is off just a little — that things aren't lining up perfectly? It's a common thing. With printing presses running as fast as they do and with paper being fed from big rolls and big stacks, it would be nearly impossible for every printed impression to register absolutely perfectly. Most people won't notice a hair's difference in register and the reason is trapping. For example, if you have a blue square printing inside a red circle, you would typically first print a red circle with an empty square shape in it. That empty square is where you would then print the the blue square. You have an empty square because if you print the blue square on top of the red circle, you'd end up with a purple square (red and blue make purple). You would expect that the empty square would be the exact size of the blue square but that would require precision that is not yet possible. If you were to do that and the press shifted even a hair's width, you'd end up with a small line of white on one side of the square. Make sense? Trapping is the process of allowing for printed pieces to be a little bit out of registration. In the case of the example above, either the blue square would be a little bit bigger than the white square or the edges of the red would overlap a little with the square. This allows for any slight variations in registration. Not much but enough. Should designers do their own trapping? No, but they should
be aware of how it works. Trapping takes a lot of time and expertise.
Printers and service bureaus know how to do it far better than a designer.
They have expensive software packages that help them and printers also
have specific knowledge of how their presses work. They do their trapping
with these parameters in mind.
Some Links You May Find Useful 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Visit other My Design Studio sites: Printing-101.com | 1WordPlace.com © Copyright My Design Studio, all rights reserved. Please read our terms of use.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ack
in the days when there were a lot more people involved with the production
process, a designer never got close to the whole process of trapping.
But, as the walls started to come tumbling down, technology knocked people
like film-strippers and many pressmen out of their jobs. These were the
people who did things like trapping, so it seemed like the responsibility
would fall on the designer. After all, the designer was responsible for
every other aspect of setting up electronic files correctly. Why not trapping?
Thank goodness it didn't work out that way.
