TIPS FOR TONING COLOR AND BLACK & WHITE HALFTONES
The recommendations below suggest ways an advertiser should prepare any half-tone for reproduction. In addition to these guidelines, The Volusia Pennysavers Graphics Department offers professional scanning and toning of your prints for a minimal charge. For questions regarding the toning of images, call our Graphics Department.

BASIC QUALITY REPRODUCTION PROCEDURE
Imagine you are an artist with a limited color palette - in fact, the palette consists of only 3 colors and black. Imagine these are the only colors that you can use to mix and paint. Now imagine that the canvas you must paint on is rather dull and very absorbent. It is so absorbent that whenever you put a little dab of paint on the canvas, the color spreads out and grows greatly from its original size. You have just imagined the very basics of printing ink on paper as it applies to newsprint. The first step to getting better looking images on newsprint is to set your monitor to represent your color palette. To do this, you must find and set the controls in your imaging program that controls monitor calibration. The following diagrams come from Photoshop 5.x. Choose File/Color Settings to get to the following dialog boxes.

STEP 1 - MONITOR CALIBRATION (RGB SETUP)
Follow the monitor calibration procedure as outlined in your printing manual. Photoshop provides a simple step-by-step procedure for this. Important - Gamma represents the overall brightness or darkness of your images as represented on the monitor. The higher the number (example 2.2), the darker the image will be as represented on your monitor. The lower the number, the lighter the image will be as represented on your monitor.

For newsprint reproduction, we suggest a gamma setting of 1.5.

STEP 2 - PRINTING INK SETUP & DOT GAIN (CMYK SETUP)
SEE DIALOG BOX "A"
Use SWOP NEWSPRINT settings and set dot gain to 39%.

STEP 3 - SEPARATION OPTIONS ("A")
1. Click on the GCR button

2. Set the black generation to light

3. Black ink limit 85%

4. Total ink limit 260%

STEP 4 - GRAYSCALE SETUP
For "Grayscale Setup" select Black Ink for print reproduction

STEP 5 - PROFILE SETUP (SEE DIALOG BOX "B")
GOOD TOOLS FOR ESTABLISHING BALANCED COLOR & TONAL CHANGES
1. Levels - Used to establish color balance and contrast

2. Curves - Used to change contrast or tonal characteristics in an image.

3. To establish a balanced highlight in your Levels box, click on the high light picker. In the Color Picker dialog box, go to the CMYK area. Type in 2% in the Cyan (C) box; 1% in the Magenta (M) box; 1% in the Yellow (Y) box; 0% in the Black (B) box.

4.To establish balanced highlight in the Curve box, click on the highlight picker, in the color picker, type in 97% in the "brightness" (B) box.

DOT GAIN FOR NEWSPRINT AND HOW IT AFFECTS YOUR HALFTONES
Dot gain is caused by the change in the size of halftone dots when ink is absorbed on paper during printing. Set your Printing Inks and Separation Setups in Photoshop to the dialog box above ("A") to achieve the best reproduction. Examples of dot gain are shown below. The Volusia Pennysavers recommend a 39% dot gain setting for our press.

SCANNING RESOLUTION - AT LEAST 150 PIXELS PER INCH
The Volusia Pennysavers print with an 85 line screen for all black and white and color image reproductions. For the proper resolution, your images should be at least 150 pixels per inch at the desired reproduction size. We recommend 200 pixels per inch.

SHARPENING
Favorite tool - Unsharp mask. Unsharp mask creates a white line and black line between two tones to give an illusion of sharpness.

RESOLUTION AFFECTS FILE SIZE AND QUALITY

"PLEASING" COLOR TIP - HUE AND SATURATION
Gamut may be defined as the printable range of tones and colors and is directly related to ink and paper types. The nature of newsprint paper and ink provides for a very limited printing gamut. To get the most vibrant and colorful results on newsprint it is often desirable to "clean up" and saturate colors to improve the appearance of purity, saturation and contrast. This may be done by using hue and saturation or selective color controls. The following images are examples of these applications. In Example 2, the colors were increased in saturation by adding wanted color. Unwanted colors were decreased to improve color purity.