Question about printing 4cp onto clear

Hope that someone may be able to help me with this (complicated?) question.

I have a client who wants to produce some temporary tattoos. The tattoo designs are 4 colour process but the substrate is clear/transparent.

Now, with a 4cp onto clear normally one could back the design with a solid white print underneath the CMYK thus giving a white background to a) make the CMYK colours more opaque, and b) give white where white appears in the design (eg a white T shirt, or the whites of the subject's eyes).

However the problem we face is that the front side of the tattoos actually has a paper release sheet applied so that you cannot see the printed design from the front side. Therefore the tattoos are packed and displayed for sale reverse-side up. Therefore the reverse side of the tattoo design needs to be visible (through the substrate). Of course, if solid white is printed all over the back side of the design then all we will see is this solid white and we won't see the design itself.

So, the design has to look the same from both sides of the substrate (although in reverse obviously).

We are told by our client that one of their other suppliers apparently has the ability to take the client's CMYK artwork and somehow add to this a white 'screen' - ie they don't add a solid white backing but in fact add white dots to the design, just like the CMYK dots. They then print it in 5 colours - CMYKW.

From what we are told this is done without any input from the client in the artwork stage. The supplier just takes the client's 4 colour artwork (a colour photo, for example) and adds the white dots/half tones or whatever you want to call them to the design on computer (I guess).

The result is white in the design only where it's needed (in dots) rather than all over the underside of the CMYK. Hence the finished article looks the same from both sides of the substrate.

Anyone heard of this and know how this is done?

Many thanks in advance

Regards

Rob

 

All i can think of

Go in to the image on Photoshop
highlight all the "need to be white" areas
give them a Panton color and later print it in white

What elss ?
nothing elss i guess

Good luck
meny

 

You are going to make money if you sell what you do well. If interested in a new market, it will take some time and a lot of research on the fiscal feasibility of a niche process. This type of substrate printing and "gourmet" process is usually accompanied by proprietary software to digitally manipulate the dot for the required result. Good luck.