A Few Tips for Final Touches

Do you really need white?

I often see people put white under shapes that didn't need it. Only place it if you really need it, black will be richer on bright enclosures without it, and it reduces the risk of registration offset.

Here's that graph again:

Think about a possible registration offset

Sometimes, SOMETIMES, the color layer might be ever so slightly off from the white layer beneath it. This makes white peek out around the edges of shapes. Usually not noticable unless your enclosure is very dark. If you're interested in trying to tackle this, you can do it in two ways.

Determine whether it's better that you use ink that is the same color as the enclosure in some places, for instance black. Because this now lives in the COLOR layer, it gets printed on top of possible registration offsets.

You can see an example in the video where I fill in some of the grim reaper with black because I was worried this might be a factor.

Another way is very thin strokes of the same color that will again be printed over possible offsets, hiding them. This can either be the same color as the shape, or the enclosure, depending on how much the exact size of the shape matters.

Be sure to set the stroke to "OUTSIDE", but default it will be a MIDDLE stroke.

Here's what outside stroke looks like in Affinity, same thing in Illustrator.

An example of this can be seen in the video on the BRICK VS FACE pedal.

Decide if you want white printed twice

White doesn't print perfectly. I guess the best way to describe it is it can look "grainy" or "noisy" on dark enclosures. Almost like the printer decided to use thousands of little dots to print (because it did).

A second white pass, which costs an extra $2 (more later) will print it twice, making it look much more uniform in white areas and colors pop more in areas where color is printed on top of white.

Rich black

You don't have to just use C 0 Y 0 M 0 K 100, get a richer black with C 20 Y 20 M 20 K 100. I recommend just always using this for black.