Printing Press

Printing Press
Printing is a process for production of texts and images, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing.
What you see is not always what you get a truism that's nowhere more apparent than in print production, where what you see on screen is often a far cry from what comes out on the printed page. The visit to the printing press was to learn the printing techniques, print jobs of a printer.
A common Printing Press has machines for 2 color and 4 color printing, mostly here in Pakistan offset printing is done, more than 80% of all print jobs are of offset.
Offset Printing
Offset printing works in a simple manner. It uses three cylinders to transfer the image onto the substrate. The first cylinder is mounted with the printing plate. The image on the printing plate is ‘right’ reading or written with the right side up. The first cylinder is inked and the image transferred or offset onto the second cylinder, which is mounted with a rubber blanket. The image on the second cylinder is thus reversed or becomes ‘wrong’ reading. Finally the image is transferred from the blanket cylinder onto the third cylinder or the substrate. The substrate is mounted on the third cylinder also known as the impression cylinder. The image once again is reversed and becomes ‘right’ reading or right side up in the final printed version.
A unique characteristic of offset printing is that the image and non-image areas are on the same surface level. The printing method uses the chemical fact that oil and water do not mix to print from a single surface level. In fact, offset printing acquired this method from lithography and thus it is often referred to as litho offset printing as well. All the print processes over there were sheet 2 sheet.
2 Color Printing
It consists of 2 cylinders, the process of 2 color printing is done in 2 chambers.
4 Color Printing
It consists of 4 cylinders the process of 4 color printing is done in 4 chambers.
Flim
Flim’s were shown to us of cards which were printed by offset. It had markings of the color composition. Some were made on a metal sheet also.
Dye cutting Machines
There were 3 dye cutting machines, 2 of them were automatic and 1 of them was manual
For cutting there were special blades fix on to it and for folding it had a blunt blade which made it easy to fold. Mostly for packages dyes are made , there was one machine which was used to punch a pin but it was called “Pin Punching Machine”. Basically it is used to punch staple pins.
Plate Making
Plates are made by films which are mostly black and transparent
Most of them are printed on metal sheets too , they are single colored they are placed accurately
The registration color is made from all the spot colors used in the print job.

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