: How were printing plates produced from multicolour drawings before the digital era? There are many ways of duplicating an image. I'm thinking of graphics-containing newspapers and magazines circa

@Si6392903

We had 2 methods. Actually we still have the two.

Color selection and color separation.

Yorik is describing the color selection, where your original was already in color.

Color separation was actually diferent black and white images. I will post later some images.

Sometimes was only used the same image and the negative was painted on itself, to lower the costs of producing aditional negatives.

(I will post later some images)

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@Ann6370331

A color separation is produced by taking a photograph of the original art using a specific-color filter on the lens and black and white transparency film in the camera. Further, for printing purposes, a halftone-screen mask was placed over the art so that the film camera captured dots instead of continuous tone.

The color filters are Red, Green, and Blue and negatives of these shots represent Cyan Magenta and Yellow.

There were 4 plates (for a short time there were 3 colors CMY, but a 4th was added).

A full plate's worth of imagery and type was on a large transparency placed in contact with the (photosensitive) plate surface and then placed in front of a high-intensity arc light.

The transparency itself was "pasted up" by hand from photographically produced type and random images (sometimes called randoms).

The plate then has the appropriate ink applied.



Even in the digital age, circa 1989, I used a black and white video camera with a manual rotating color wheel attached to an Amiga computer to digitize color images for animation.

If I remember correctly, you can manually convert and RGB digital image to CMY by converting the RGB values to a percentage and then subtracting that from 100%.



Paste-up:



Negative Stripping:

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