Printing Aesthetics (2)

Fourth, the development of printing needs aesthetics as a basis

Contemporary printing has become an integrated practical science. As far as the entire production process is concerned, from manuscript finishing, to photocopying, color separation, trimming, plate making, printing, and binding, the periods involved optical, electrical, chemical, color, design, mathematics, mechanics, electronics, respectively. Computer technology, statistics, management, psychology, of course, can not be separated from aesthetics.

The popularity of electronic computers has greatly improved the level of automatic control of the three major systems before printing, printing, and printing. This has led many people to believe that the era when everyone can be competent for printing has arrived, but the facts tell us that many plants The equipment is up, but the quality of the printing does not improve and the inferior product is printed as it is. This is because no matter how advanced science and technology are used by people, the more modern and advanced science and technology, the more operators are required to master advanced science and technology knowledge and ability, the more they must have aesthetic qualities. This is illustrated by the large number of facts. With the advent of Photoshop software, its function of image processing has reached the point where many professional painters cannot match it. Many people think that they will become experts in graphic processing overnight. In the summer of 1998, I participated in the DTP technical training course of the news publishing system. The teachers concerned compared the works created by the students of the Department of Printing and the Department of Fine Arts with Photoshop. Everyone was surprised to find that the differences between the works of these two students are obvious. The aesthetic feeling of student work is indeed different.

The French sculptor Rodin said: "The United States is everywhere. For our eyes, it is not the lack of beauty but the lack of discovery." The difference between these two students is the lack of "discovery" and "discovery" of the real. The beauty lies. The reason why this is so is because everyone's aesthetic levels are mixed. Learning a bit of aesthetics can enable us to enhance our ability to recognize beauty and ugliness, transforming our simple aesthetic consciousness into a regular understanding, and consciously and generally consistent aesthetic requirements. . Moreover, there is a higher aesthetic quality, open aesthetic realm, it will naturally transform into our desire for continuous innovation, and further apply the laws of the United States in the printing of the United States to promote the quality of printed products. All this is to explain that printing technology is a difficult and complicated creative work for the dissemination of scientific culture and for the realization of the formal beauty of printed products.

China's invention of engraving technology 700 years earlier than Europe, the invention of movable type printing technology 400 years earlier than Germany. However, in modern times, our country lags behind these countries. After the experts studied, they found three reasons. In addition to the fact that since the Ming and Qing dynasties implemented the eight-member literary system and the 120-year literary prisons in the Qingkang, Yi, and Qiang dynasties, the wisdom of the intellectuals was imprisoned, and there was another important reason. The creation of inventions in the society as a printing technique is "strange techniques, ingenuity and skill." We should draw lessons from this historical lesson.

Since the invention of printing technology, people have always hoped that they can display images with shades and shades on prints. However, since there are only inked areas and non-inked areas on the printing plate, it is impossible to reflect the changes in the image layer by the thickness of the ink layer. For a long time, printing was limited to text copying. Later, people used the density of the lines to express the level, and only from a distance to see the effect of continuous adjustment, the effect of image reproduction was greatly limited.

Until 1868, the German Joseph albert invented the printing of the Jurassic, and for the first time in the world, there were prints with different shades. The Feiluo Edition does not require screening, and uses negative images to continuously adjust the negative film. The use of photosensitive film due to the difference in the amount of light received causes the degree of hardening of the film layer to be different. The extent of film hardening determines the difference in the expansion condition, and the degree of expansion is different. The formation of fine wrinkles with different density patterns, the greater the amount of light received, the greater the degree of hardening, the smaller the expansion, the more wrinkles, the less water it absorbs, the more adherent ink, and the darker the hue after printing; Bright, so that various levels on the original image can be reproduced. Because the colloidal colloids are impressed directly by the paper, their resistance to printing is very low and cannot meet the requirements for mass printing.

In the history of printing, the history of web-free printing has been quite long, about 1,300 years. In this long history, people’s desire to improve the printing effect has not changed. People's confidence in pursuing perfection has not changed. With long-term practice and hard work to explore, printing finally has an epoch-making technological invention – printing on the web.

In 1882, German Georg Meisenbach invented the line screen screening technology. Because the average transmission of the screen is about 1/2, it is called Halftone Screens. People can start to adjust the continuous tone image after screening. Decompose into halftone images for platemaking. In 1886, Americans Ives and Ievy rotated the line mesh 90 degrees to create a reticle glass screen. Successfully divided the image into different size and uniform density dots. The dot size showed the image brightness from different areas. Strength. This series of inventions unveiled the history of human-network printing. Since then, people have continued to explore, and invented Galata screens, contact screens, electronic screening, FM screening, and so on. This has opened up a new world for printing more perfect graphics.

Some people think that printing is just copying and "permeating the gourd," and it does not have any effect on the form of the manuscript. The printing industry is mainly a processing industry. Its process can only faithfully reproduce originals. This is correct, but whether or not it can mobilize all technological means and technologies to maximize the reproduction of originals is not only a matter of duplication technology, but also More is an art problem.

Let's take a copy of a color image as an example. Take a look at the importance of aesthetics in printing.

First of all, the producers must face the aesthetic considerations of the drawings, grasp the artistic conception of the painter and the photographer “Xin Wan Wan” and “Transmission of the portrayal”, and the subtleties of color, lines, layout and the combination of light and shade, light and shade, and shade, and then Taking into account how to process design to reproduce the true face of the draft. Ancient artists have a famous saying: "Foreign scholars make things good, get the heart in the heart." This refers to the creation, but as the printer of the artwork, at least it is necessary to use the artwork as a teacher to probe the artist's "heart". Can you do this? It's quite different for the effect of beautifully printed artwork. Secondly, the difference in the density of a typical manuscript can reach 3.0, and the maximum density difference of the current print can only reach 2.2, and in general it does not exceed 1.8. When printing and copying, it is necessary to maintain a density level of more than 0.2 on the original, and to control the contrast of about 1.8, there is a problem that a plate making operator selects a certain portion of the original to reproduce. Third, according to the author's taste of the manuscript, the original plate color separation, how to optimize the combination of colors, gray balance control, but also great knowledge, after entering the printing process, we must use good color printing, adjust the printing pressure , control the balance of ink and wash. In order to print bright, colorful products. This shows that printing is not a solution to the manuscript. In the cover printing of the book “Fun Geography” published by Jiangsu Juvenile Children's Publishing House, the background color of the cover of the book is black, and the black ink was used only when the printing was started. The effect was always unsatisfactory and sluggish than the original. The black printing effect is surprisingly good. It is faithful to the solemn and solemn color of the original manuscript, and is thicker and brighter than the original manuscript.

From the above examples, it is not difficult to draw such a conclusion: the mastering of printing technology, the improvement of printing level, and the development of printing industry are inseparable from aesthetics.

The fifth and twenty-first century is the era of perfection in printing

Quality is the life of printing companies, technology is the guarantee for the development of printing companies, and the pursuit of the spirit of perfection is the driving force for the development of printing enterprises.

Modern printing technology has a history of more than 100 years. Screening methods are from amplitude modulation screening to frequency modulation screening. The size of network points is from coarse to fine network. The distribution of network points is from random distribution to irregular distribution. Technology from the decomposition of optics to electronic decomposition, all these technological improvements and innovations, its central purpose is to improve the quality of printing to meet the community's demand for the beauty of printed products. With the further development of science and technology, the improvement of the quality of printing materials and printing equipment, and the advancement of printing technology, printing in the 21st century will move toward a higher level of beauty - high-fidelity printing.

The so-called high-fidelity printing, the author believes that it should include high-line printing, high-saturation printing, high-density printing.

1. High-line printing, which began in the 1990s, aims at improving the resolution and resolution of printed images. It is generally believed that using 1201/cm or more of network cable to add a network, or using FM to achieve network can be called high network printing.

The highest number of printing lines published by Drupa'90 is 200 l/cm. Nowadays, high-line printing technology has developed considerably. On Drupa'95, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries provided 275l/cm prints that were particularly attractive and three-dimensional. Later, some companies produced prints of 350 l/cm and 400 l/cm, and they developed at higher network lines of 600 l/cm.

High-line printed products have the following aesthetics:

1 The resolution of prints has increased, and the range of color reproduction has expanded. In high-line printing, the details of the image and the small text can be clearly displayed. In addition, the dot size becomes smaller, and the red, green, and blue inks (yellow, magenta, and cyan) on the printed matter have fewer overlapping portions, and the resulting color difference is reduced. The color saturation of the color is increased and the entire image is enlarged. The range of color reproduction narrows the gap between print and photographs and the natural world.

2 The texture of the printed matter is improved. The smooth gradation that can reproduce the photographer's picture within the distance of the visual distance, such as the transparency of the porcelain, can be reproduced and gives a realistic feeling.

3 Moire is suppressed. Moire is the common name for the Moire pattern that occurs when the angle of the screen is improperly controlled or reproduced during printing. Moire affects the aesthetics of prints and is one of the phenomena to be avoided in printing. When weaving holes and parallel line patterns appear on the original, high-line printing can suppress the occurrence of moiré and create a vivid print. At the same time, with extremely fine dots, the pattern is not easily perceived. Rose flower pattern is suppressed.

2. High-saturation printing is a method of reproducing originals by increasing the print quality. At present, FM is mainly used for screening technology, multi-color printing method (ie, CMYK + spot color), multi-color printing than simply with 4 color ink printing can perform wide color gamut, high saturation. The Indigo E-Print 1000 exhibited at Drupa'95 uses two printing methods to increase the chroma, achieving a six-color color print, which in turn increases the print quality by one notch.

3. High-density printing is a method of reproducing originals by increasing the density of printed solids. The field density data it uses are: yellow 1.3 to 1.65; magenta and blue 2.05 to 2.17; black 2.1 to 2.3, and the actual field density values ​​for the printed matter are: yellow 1.1; magenta 1.45; blue 1.55; black 1.7 or so, The increase in density on the ground has improved the ability of prints to express color, but in terms of overall results, it is inferior to high-saturation printing.

In the future high-fidelity printing process, FM screening will become the mainstream of expressive tone levels. FM screening was first proposed 100 years after the glass screen was invented. It was first proposed by German Scheuter and Fisher in 1982. However, because of the limitation of the computer's calculation and storage capabilities at the time, it was unable to meet the requirements of FM screening, making the FM screening technology not paid for practical application. In the 1990s, the further improvement of computer computing and storage capabilities, as well as the continuous improvement and improvement of the FM screening network theory, in the Spring of 1993, at the Seybold Symposium in Boston, USA, Agfa Corporation and Linotype-Hell Company were exhibited at the same time. Samples of FM screen printing were first introduced to the world by FM screening technology. Our country responded quickly to FM technology. In August of the same year, Peking University Founder also developed its own FM screening technology.

FM screening technology is to scan input