A Closer Look at Four-Color Printing

Beginning with this issue, most English-language editions of “Awake!” as well as some other language editions join “The Watchtower” in changing permanently to a four-color format. Four-color printing is the process of reproducing natural colors by combining three basic colors and black. How are four-color pictures produced on a printed page? What technology is now being used? The following article describes part of what is involved in four-color work at the Watchtower Society’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York.

THE printing of pictures in magazines, newspapers, and books produces an optical illusion. For example, consider how a black-and-white photograph or drawing is reproduced by the widely used offset-printing method.

Printing in black and white uses one printing ink​—black. When you look at a black-and-white picture, however, your eye sees tones of gray too. How are the various tones of gray, as well as the black, produced on a printed page? By the use of dots.

Dots? Yes, dots of ink. If you use a strong magnifying glass to look at a printed picture, you will see that the picture is made up of many small dots. There is no longer the continuous tone of an artist’s drawing or of a photograph. To get on the printed page, a picture must be transformed into dots.

How are the dots made? The drawing or photo is reconstructed into a pattern of small and clearly defined dots by a large machine called a scanner. The scanner has a computer that electronically interprets tones and produces varying sizes of dots. A laser is used to expose those dots on photographic film. The various tones of gray are thus obtained by changing the size of these dots, which accept the ink that is then transferred from the printing plates to the paper.

When printing is done on white paper, the lighter the shade, the smaller the dots will be. Darker shades will be reproduced as bigger dots. Thus, the dots “trick” the eye into seeing what appears to be continuous tones of black and shades of gray of the original photo or drawing.

Color Reproduction More Complicated

Full-color reproduction is more complicated than black and white. Here, three basic colors plus black are used: (1) cyan (greenish blue); (2) magenta (raspberry red); and (3) yellow; plus (4) black. Dots carrying each of these four inks are combined in layers on the paper by the printing press to reproduce the wide range of colors your eye sees on a printed page.

However, from the original drawing or photograph, it is first necessary to isolate each of the three main colors and the black into sets of dots that indicate the lighter or darker intensities of each color. But how do these four colors make all the other different colors that you see on a printed page?

Let us say that we have a photo of green grass that we want reproduced in our magazine. During printing, the paper will pass through four sections on the press, each section adding one of the colors. The dots on one set of printing plates pick up cyan ink and transfer their shape to the paper. As the paper moves at high speed along the press, another set of plates with its dots picks up yellow ink and transfers their impression to the paper alongside the dots of cyan. Light reflected from the cyan and yellow inks plus white paper is seen by the eye as green. All the other colors of the rainbow result when the four printing sections lay down their dot combinations in the four colors of ink.

Our Production Sequence

Long before the finished product comes off the press, much work must be done. Film (negatives or positives) must be made of the photo or art to be printed. This film will be the basis for making the printing plates for the press.

A color page of a printed magazine requires, at a minimum, four pieces of film, one for each of the three main colors plus one for the black. This film is produced by our laser scanner. The scanner analyzes the photo or art work to be reproduced and stores the image in its memory.

The scanning machine looks like a ten-foot-long (3 m) lathe. It has a high-intensity light-beam that probes across the color picture as it spins on a cylinder. As it scans, the light is reflected and is split by optical devices into three light-paths, one for each primary color. Each light-path has a filter that blocks out all but one basic color. The black is produced by combining the signals for the three basic colors in the areas that appear black in the original.

The scanner, with the help of a computer, translates the intensities of each color into electronic signals, and through an electronic “screening” process produces the corresponding dots, which are then stored in the computer’s memory.

What if the photo or drawing is too big or too stiff to bend around the cylinder of the scanner? Then a color photograph or transparency (35 mm or larger) is made and mounted on the cylinder. The scanner can enlarge or reduce the image as desired.

Page-Makeup Station

Next, the information stored in the computer is displayed at a page-makeup station. This station has a keyboard and a monitor that resembles a large television screen. By pressing certain keys, the operator causes the picture to appear on the screen. By electronic means, he makes needed adjustments in color tones. Details can be either sharpened or eliminated.

The station can also combine elements of different pictures to make a single picture. For example, a sunset from one picture, a man from a second, and a house from a third can be combined to form one picture of a man in front of a house at sunset.

After adjustments, the electronic signals representing the picture can be sent by computer to other machines to make either proofs or film.

Making Color Proofs

The color-proofing device uses beams of red, green, and blue light to make a color proof. This proof material is made of the same kind of paper that you get back from a camera shop when you send in pictures to get processed.

Several staff members analyze the proofs. Perhaps some feel that the sky in a picture is not blue enough​—it is too green. “Take some yellow out,” others suggest. “But the bananas in the fruit basket have to stay just as yellow,” another cautions. So adjustments in color tone need to be made to take some yellow out of the sky but not out of the bananas. To do this, we go back to the page-makeup station, where the operator makes the changes.

Now we have an actual copy of the picture that we will be printing. Once this picture is approved, we tell the computer that it is time to put the pages in order for producing the film.

The Final Product

The film recorder has a laser. The laser reacts to the signals and in turn exposes the electronic dots onto film negatives. A separate piece of film is made for each color. One film has the dots representing the magenta in the original picture; a second has the cyan; a third has the yellow; and a fourth has the black. These films are the actual size of the picture as it will appear in the magazine.

The final assembly of text with pictures is made on a light-table. Now we take our pieces of film with all the dots representing the pictures, and in their proper printing sequence. These flats of film are given to a person called an image assembler. He looks at the quality of the film, and adds on a separate sheet of plastic the words or text in negative form. The people doing this work use magnifying lenses to make sure that the film for each color fits precisely on top of the other. Otherwise, when out of alignment, distortion occurs when the picture is printed.

Now we have the pictures and words in the right places to make a magazine. We make another proof of all the pieces of this magazine in place. Once this is approved, we can send these materials to the plate rooms in the factories in Brooklyn and Wallkill, New York.

Duplicate sets are sent to the Watch Tower Society’s other four-color printing branches around the world. Each branch then makes offset plates from the film.

In the plate-making process, a high-intensity ultraviolet light is passed through the film, and the pictures and the words are exposed onto the offset plate. The plate is made of an aluminum alloy and is chemically coated. How thick are these plates that will be curved to fit the press cylinders? This varies for different types of presses, but at our Brooklyn plant the plates are only 8/1,000 inch thick! At our Watchtower Farms plant, located outside New York City, the presses are larger, and hence the plates are thicker.

The plates are mounted on the press in proper color order and are now ready for the printing of the magazine. As the cylinders of the press rotate, each plate gets its one color from a special reservoir that contains ink of that color. The ink is transferred from the metal plate to a cylinder covered with a rubber sheet, or blanket, which in turn transfers the ink to the paper. When all four colors are imposed on top of one another on the paper, we approximate natural color.

But we are not through yet. Imposing four inks on top of one another creates a sticky combination that needs to be dried quickly. So the paper passes through a high-velocity hot-air drying unit toward the end of the press. High temperature quickly dries the ink. Then the heated paper runs over water-cooled rollers to bring the temperature down and harden the ink.

Color Limits

How well does this process reproduce the colors of an original photograph or drawing? No machine can reproduce exactly what the human eye sees. The human eye can see from five million to ten million shades of color! But an offset press can print only five hundred to a thousand shades. Thus we cannot duplicate the brightest white or the darkest color details of the original picture.

Another important factor is the type of paper used. The color brightness achieved is limited by the quality and makeup of the paper and how effectively the inks are laid down on that type of paper. With the Awake! and The Watchtower, the paper quality is limited by cost considerations because we want these magazines to be as low in cost as possible so they can be readily obtained by millions of people earth wide, including those with limited funds.

The cost to readers is also reduced because our work is nonprofit. Something else that contributes to the low cost is the fact that the thousands of workers producing the magazines in Watch Tower branches throughout the world are all full-time volunteer ministers who receive only room and board and a small monthly reimbursement for expenses.

Worth the Effort

The average person looking at a magazine in full color may not at first appreciate the enormous amount of work and technology that is involved, from writing the material to printing it and bringing it to his home. In fact, to get a magazine ready for the press, virtually the same effort must be put forth for one in a language requiring just a few thousand copies as for an English Awake! or Watchtower magazine with its millions of copies.

But it is worth the effort. Natural color makes printed material more interesting and appealing and therefore encourages reading. Obviously we respond favorably to color because our Creator made us to see in color. Therefore, this step forward to regular four-color printing in Awake! is desirable. And as we keep learning how to improve our printing methods, we will continue to upgrade the quality of our magazines to make them even more beneficial and enjoyable.

[Pictures on page 24]

Operator setting up scanner

Inset: Blown-up section of picture

[Picture on page 25]

Operator at page-makeup station

[Picture on page 26]

Comparing color proofs with original transparency