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What is CMYK Printing vs. Spot Color Printing in
Heat Transfer Printing for Skateboards?

What are Vector Graphics?

What are Raster Graphics?

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CMYK printing vs. Spot Color printing in heat transfer printing for skateboards:

CMYK printing simulates a full range of color by mixing varying percentages of four primary colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. When these colors are printed on a surface, they subtract from white light that reflects off the background, creating the illusion of color; for this reason, CMYK is a “subtractive” color model. This is called “4-color” or process printing.  With heat transfer printing the dots used to make the CMYK are fairly large so the effective resolution is somewhat low.  Spot color printing is always recommended over CMYK(in terms of print quality) because the solid blocks of color used lose very little resolution compared to CMYK printing.  The biggest drawback to Spot color printing versus CMYK printing is that CMYK can effectively create an unlimited amount of colors with only printing 5 colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and White).  Spot color printing requires that every color in a graphic be printed individually.   Metallic, pearlescent, fluorescent, and phosphorescent can’t be created by CMYK printing, each of these  colors must be printed individually using spot colors.  Heat transfers are screen printed by hand one color at a time so the question to be answered is “Am I willing to spend the extra money on the additional set-ups to get a better looking graphic?”