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To: Gauguin who wrote (51688)	6/2/2000 2:49:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Justin is my old boyfriend in New Orleans who teaches printing in a trade school. He is the one who taught me enough printing to get a job - he used to have his own print shop. I learned typesetting, camera, and binding, but not running a press, because I don't like to get my hands dirty. Pressmen's hands are always stained with ink, like mechanic's hands are always stained with grease. I don't mind getting my hands dirty once in a while, but not all the time. The computer has changed the newspaper world, all type is set on computer these days, although newspaper are still printed from plates. The process is usually photolithography. A litho plate is metal coated with an emulsion that hardens when it is exposed to a very bright light like an arc lamp. The film is black and clear, no grey. When the plate is exposed, the part that was clear lets the light through, and the emulsion hardens. The emulsion that wasn't hit by light stays soft. Then you wash off the emulsion, or dissolve it off with a special solvent. Then you rub the plate with a gum to protect it. When the plate is put on the press it is flexible, and bends into an arc to fit the cylinder on the press. The ink sticks to the emulsion, and is offset, that is, it makes an inky reverse impression on a rubber roller, and that inky reverse impression is what touches the paper and makes a positive ink mark on the paper. The process uses water, too, which sticks to the part of the plate and roller that isn't inky, and keeps the ink from adhering to the non-image area.

To: Gauguin who wrote (51688)	6/2/2000 2:57:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

How do you convert a computer-generated image to a piece of film? It's printed out, and then pasted onto a piece of stiff paper that is a bit larger than the printed paper, called boards. That's called layout, or paste-up. I can do that, too. Then it's shot, and I described shooting camera a few days ago. The pieces of film are arranged on a canary yellow rectangular piece of paper that is the same size as the metal printing plate. Putting the pieces of film where they go on the yellow piece of paper, a "flat", is called stripping, because the pieces of film look like strips. Not film strips, just like you cut pieces of paper into strips. It's not hard to do except for color work, especially four-color process. Four color ink is black, magenta, cyan and yellow, and a mixture of these can make almost any color. Magenta and yellow ink printed together make red, it's the strangest thing. Add some cyan and you've got dark blue. To get the images to line up, each image has to be on the same place on each plate. So you have to line up each image on each flat. That requires using a magnifying glass, and a lot of precision. That's why master strippers get paid so well. Four color is stripped to large pieces of mylar, so you can see through it, and then that is masked with the yellow flat. And every flat is punched on a special punch so they all line up using pins. I still have my stripping pins, some register marks, my magnifying glasses, and my retouching tools and brushes. Real strippers have their own equipment, just like real mechanics and carpenters do. But I don't really see well enough to strip 200 dot per inch four color anymore. 65 dot per inch, yes. Good thing I went to law school.