Foil Printing Services Australia

ePrint specialise in custom printing, and it doesn’t come much more custom than adding foil embellishments to your printing. Foil can be added to your printing in three different ways:

OPTION 1: FOIL ONLY

Foil only is whereby the only print you can see on your printing is purely metallic foil. This is often very effective on coloured or slightly textured media, where the foil stands out in stark contrast and in elegant soil, reflective colour. Foil colours available are – Gold Foil, Silver Foil, Rose Gold, Green, Red, Blue and Copper.

OPTION 2: PRINT & FOIL

Print & Foil option is where you have a design that includes a standard CMYK (colour) layer or elements, but also FOIL elements as well. In this scenario, neither element overlap. The reason being is the foil is added digitally by printing down a solid black, and then the foil is applied through a heat process and sticks to wherever the black print exists. This way you print the foil layer first in 100% black, apply the foil sheet – by – sheet, then run the prints back through the print engine to apply the standard colour plates. If we were to add the CMYK print first, wherever the foil sees print, it sticks indiscriminately.

So how do we print foil with coloured backgrounds?

OPTION 3: FOIL OVERPRINT

To print foil on top of a CMYK print layer, we use this method. To do this, we print the CMYK layer first obviously, but we “seal” that printed layer with a thin laminate called celloglaze. The particular celloglaze we use here is called “soft touch” which adds a smooth velvet feeling layer over top of the printed surface to allow for overprinting the foil layer after. Print layer first, cover it with soft touch, overprint in 100% black, then apply solid foil to the overlay pattern or text.

How to setup files for Foil Printing

To setup your files for foil printing, you first need to establish which of the above foil flaring scenarios meets the process you’re after.

For option 1 (FOIL ONLY), you only need to supply one digital design file which is in 100% black. The black only represents where your chosen foil colour will be applied to the sheet in a 100% metallic foil flare application. Foil cannot be applied with a gradient.

In scenario 2 (Foil & Print) where neither foil and print elements interact, you would supply two (or three) design files. They would be: print file with no foil elements and a second file (again in 100% black) where the foil would be applied (just like in scenario 1). You can also supply a digital proof file as your third option, which displays both elements as a finished product – we will not (and cannot) print from a file that has both elements included on the one artboard design.

For scenario 3 (Foil Overprint), design files would be supplied in the exact same way to scenario 2 but this time can include a filled in background on the CMYK print design. It is recommended to supply the digital proof file in this type of run.

NOTE – digital foiling is achieved by doing multiple passes on our print engine. This means that sometimes the foil will not align 100% perfectly to the CMYK print layer – avoid elements that are dependent on each other to create context. Foil and print elements should not go together to make one image split  between (or shared) each layer. Example, do not create an image of an animal, and need the foil element to perfectly align with said animal to make eyes or anything like that… image can and often does shift. Allow for 1mm of shift when doing a two pass foil print.

DOWNLOAD FOIL GUIDE 

See ePrint’s range of Foil Printing now – all can be ordered online now!

• WE ALSO OFFER FOIL SAMPLE PACKS (PRE-PRINTED AND READY TO SHIP SAME DAY) TO TRY OUR DIGITAL FOIL COLOURS (ALL COLOURS INCLUDED)

 DOWNLOAD FOIL GUIDE