What If? EMToast Weekly News: Process Color Edition, 2008-2026

Growing up with my father printing newspapers, I heard the words “process color” a lot. Dad was an expert at color printing. He had worked at a high-end book printing operation that produced a lot of books with glossy, detailed color printing.

When the large printing operation he worked at shut down in the early '80s, he had just bought the house, had no money, and had two young kids and a wife to take care of. It took some time, but he found a new job at a local paper that had just started running a four-color web offset press. The guys there knew nothing about printing in color. They needed a pro at process color.

Process color is a way of printing full-color pictures using just four ink colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). Tiny dots of those four inks are combined in different amounts to create the wide range of colors you see in a printed image.

Before the printing plates were made, there were transparent sheets, one for each color. The cyan, magenta, yellow, and black separations were used to make the four thin aluminum printing plates. Each plate carried the tiny dots for its particular color. The plates transferred their ink to rubber blankets, which then transferred the four colors onto the paper, one on top of another, creating the full-color image.

I'll never be able to design or print my own process color newspaper, but we can imagine.

So here they are.

 EMToa.st Weekly News Color PRINTABLE PDF