Heavy ink

Riso wasn’t intended to print full pages of ink, and we can’t print full pages of colour – too much ink means the paper sticks to the ink drum and causes all sorts of problems! Any large blocks of ink should ideally be set to 75% density or less, and please bear in mind that large areas of solid colour can have inconsistent ink coverage.

If your artwork has too much solid black it can crash the print drivers which means the file just won’t print. In these cases we suggest that you reduce the intensity of coverage, or even invert the design to have more white areas than black.

In particular, heavy ink on the top edge of the print are more susceptible to inky roller marks, and sometimes result in a line of ink dragged down the centre of the page. If you only have heavy ink on one edge, you might be able to rotate your file 180° to get around this issue.

Type

For best results, make sure any body text (12pt or smaller) is set to registration black in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign – even if you’re not printing using black ink!

If the Riso knows it’s printing text it will preserve sharpness and ensure a higher quality print. We recommend not using Photoshop to set type, as this means it is rasterised and no longer ‘read’ by the machine as text.

Legibility of text deteriorates drastically at lower opacities, so avoid printing body text or important information in pale colours – save that for large titles or decorative text.

Avoid using ‘knockout’ or white text, as the riso isn’t reading the text but rather the area around the text, so it’s not as sharp. We don’t recommend using white text on two-colour prints as these will not line up perfectly, meaning it will not be very readable in print. 

Overlays

RISO inks are semi-transparent, so inks can be printed on top of each other for more colour options.

Use the ‘multiply’ blend mode in photoshop to see an approximation of how your design might look in print.

Misregistration

Each ink is printed one at a time, so colours rarely line up perfectly on top of each other. This gives riso’s distinctive ‘misregistration’, where the alignment of colours shifts between each print. This is an inherent part of the process and makes each print totally unique – part of why we love riso.

We don’t usually suggest overprinting small details or text as they won’t always line up perfectly. Each print can vary by 3mm in any direction, so please bear this in mind when designing your artwork and include trapping if necessary. Or embrace the imperfection!

Photographs

Riso can work well with monochrome photographs. If your photo looks good in black and white, chances are it’ll work well on RISO. Try bumping up the contrast, as images often come out paler than you expect. 

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can try using riso inks to simulate a CMYK effect. You can often get a great effect using just using blue, yellow and fluo pink, and leaving out the black entirely. Or you can separate channels into teal, yellow and fluo orange for a retro-photo look.

If you’re not comfortable separating channels in photoshop, try Spektrolite – a free app that generates riso layers for you.

Halftones

RISO automatically processes greyscale files as a Bitmap, and makes the image up out of dots either in a grain pattern (Grain Touch) or by applying a halftone screen (Screen-covered).

At the print stage, we also have the option to adjust the LPI (38-200) and angles (0-90) for the halftone screen.

We’re usually pretty good at choosing the right options for each image, but if you want to use a particular setting please specify when sending in your files.