The printing industry has very wide modifications and printing steps, and lithography is one of these steps. Lithography is a special step that can be used to print on paper material. Printing means seeing images, writings on different types of materials.
What is lithography?
The most difficult and important stage of offset printing belongs to lithography. After finishing the design of desired files, lithography turns it into special metal plates (zinc) through special processes. Whatever you want to print on paper must be transferred to these special pages. Lithography is known as mother printing industry because of its practicality and hard work. The lithography process is used when the desired print is with an offset machine.
Steps of lithography work
In order to produce a lithograph, it must go through a series of steps that include:
• Create CMYK file, this word Cmyk in the printing industry means standard color combination. The four colors blue, red, yellow and black are considered standard colors. To reproduce the images, the original file must be split into these four standard colors. In the next step, these color files are transferred separately to the metal plates.
• Well, color files have been produced. At this stage, these files are printed on metal plates with a special type of polymer.
- Metal plates have a special feature, they repel ink, no ink can be placed on this material. But that part of the pages that has polymer materials has the property of absorbing ink. These two very important and sensitive factors are the basis of lithography and offset printing.
• The type of polymer material that is placed on zinc is sensitive to ultraviolet light and evaporates when exposed to these conditions. After the polymer is transferred on the metal plates, it is placed in a chamber to see the light, so that the evaporation operation takes place, and the parts of the zinc that the polymer has not seen the light do not evaporate, and its polymer material remains. After the evaporation steps, zinc is washed with ammonia derivatives. This step is to completely clean the parts exposed to light and not to put polymer materials on it. These steps are called lithography.
Offset
Lithography means offset, so you need to know what offset printing is and where lithography works. Offset printing is affordable and common. Everything that is printed with this device must be designed on a metal plate, which lithography is responsible for. So, if there is no lithography step, offset printing is not possible. During the lithography process, the metal plate called zinc makes the parts that are to be printed with ink for zinc, and other printing steps on the machine are set by its operator. One of the most important reasons why offset printing is not suitable for low circulations is the time-consuming lithography process.
What is modern lithography?
Technology has not left the lithography industry unchanged. Due to the time-consuming and difficult process of lithography, manufacturers have designed more special equipment and devices to improve this process. The name of one of these devices is Platester. This device has created the conditions that the user does not need to do the initial stage of lithography, which is the creation of color separated files. The Platecenter machine receives the image and printed content very easily and easily from the computer, and you receive the ready zinc from the machine with the desired speed. The nature and application of old zinc lithography is not different from the new method, the only difference is in the zinc production method.
Source: tarhmarkt
