What is the name for the old way newspapers printed color comics using countless dots of color to form the image? And, was there any reason they couldn’t make color images any other way, or was this simply a cost-saving (ink-saving) technique? - Jinx
It’s not a cost saving on ink they cared about but presses.
Four color is a lot cheaper than the eight or more colors used for printing things like posters, which required more rollers.
Also, alignment of even four colors is a headache, so most cartoons, even today, do not use mixes of colors for a single area, like a shirt. The papers give a chart of acceptable colors to the colorists so that even if the alignment is off a little you can still get a fair image.
Wiki on halftones (with a nice picture of a cat).
Some artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol exaggerate half-tone dots for effect, and then they are known as Ben-day dots.
No, Benday dots were widely used throughout the comic book world before Lichtenstein appropriated them.
I didn’t mean Lichtenstein originated them, just that he is a prominent and recognizable artist employing them.
It saves a lot of time, which is important since big newspapers have to produce hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages in the few hours before the final news comes in and the first deliveries go out. Money is also an enormous factor, since just a 1-penny difference in per-page production cost becomes tens of thousands of dollars by the end of each day’s run.
Things are a little different now that digital printers have become more standard (this is still an ongoing transition, spreading from small users to bigger ones, and I believe most newspapers still use the older systems), but on web printing systems (webs of rollers, not Internet web), the paper passes through a set of rollers for each color of ink. If you wanted to pre-mix special colors instead of using the standard Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK system, you’d need to add a separate set of rollers for every different color in your picture, which adds a lot of time, money and complexity (if one color’s even a millimeter out of alignment, it will be very visible in the final print). Extra colors are sometimes done, though, usually when a metallic shade like gold or silver is needed in addition to CMYK. It’ll cost you a lot, though.
As for why you’d use dots, it’s probably the most accurate way to get the image you want without pre-mixing the inks and applying them by hand. Mixing colors is not an exact science, and there are a lot of factors that can affect how they blend (humidity, temperature, paper type, ink type, how hot the rollers are (colors can shift over the course of a run because of this), the age of the ink, how long the ink has been exposed to the air, etc). Again, digital printing systems have changed and simplified this a lot, but the basic principle still applies. If you try to have the different colors mix on the page while wet, you’ll probably end up with ink smeared all over the page and all over your press. If you let the ink dry enough to pass cleanly through the press, the colors won’t mix and will just layer on the pages (probably drifting in the process). Dots are a way to print images cleanly while using just a few colors to trick the eye into thinking it’s seeing a wide range of shades.
It’s still done today, in fact. The big difference is that the printers (as well as the software that manages the halftone process) now are much better quality and higher resolution, so the individual dots aren’t nearly as visible.
::ducks head in::
Did someone call my name?
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Hunh.
::ducks head out::