Plate IV · Experiment
Out of register
Out of register
Every colour picture you have ever held was four plates: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Drop one in, pull the plates apart, and put them back.
How it works
Process printing builds every colour from four inks. The picture is separated into four plates, each one a halftone of how much of that ink a spot needs, and the four are printed on top of each other in register. Where the dots overlap the inks multiply, and from reading distance the eye mixes them back into the picture.
Each plate here is screened at its traditional angle, cyan at fifteen degrees, magenta at seventy-five, yellow at zero and black at forty-five. Those angles are not arbitrary. They keep the four grids from lining up, and the pattern they make where they cross is the rosette you can see in any magazine with a loupe. Move a plate and the rosette breaks, which is what a print looks like when the press was not set right.
The separation is the plain formula, black from the darkest channel and the other three from what is left, screened at 1600 pixels on the long edge. The download is the four plates composited exactly where you dragged them, with nothing behind them. Nothing leaves the browser.