Manufacturing Skills for Plating of Flexible Printing

Flexo printing can be found almost everywhere in packaging industry, especially in paper packaging field. We have custom printing paper boxes and flexo printing bags to meet our customers’ demand. Speaking of flexo printing, the printing plate is an indispensable factor in printing process. In the printing process, on the one hand, it receives the ink from the ink roller, on the other hand, it transfers the graphic ink to the substrate surface or other printing intermediate carrier. The quality of printing plate will directly determine the quality of printed matter. 

The following tips should be strictly followed to make a great flexible printing plate.

Quality control of plate making negative

The negative making of flexo plate is made by color DTP system just like that of offset plate. However, having its own characteristics, the negatives should meet below requirements before plate making. 

The density value of its non-graphic part should not be less than 4.0 and the transparent image and text part should not be greater than 0.05.

Small texts or thin lines should be avoided to make sure of complete printing.

It is not suggested to have the large printing area and the small printing text or image exist at the same time, since large scale printing requires more pressure, while small printing requires less. It is not likely to be achieved at the same time.

Requirements for plate making operation

The surface of the plate should be frosted so that it helps export the air. And no extra pressure is allowed to be imposed to the plate before exposure. A constant operation of removing the protective film should be done to avoid additional ink at this place.

Inspection of plate making quality

The quality of plate making should be checked by comparing the graphic quality of plate making negative with that of plate surface.

A quality plate making should be have suitable letters, lines, patterns with the plate. And the edges of the image should be smooth and neat.