Although the home use printers can produce high quality printouts. Couples can certainly print their wedding cards at home. However, many of them will still opt to hire a wedding invitation printer to do the work. This is because it is virtually no way to do some of the printing processes at home. The followings are some of the common process that will be involved in invitation card printing.

Full Color Printing

In fact, it should be called four color printing. With the four colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK in short), you can nearly get all the colors printed. Indeed it is possible to have color printing at home and some of the home use printers are also using CMYK colors. However, it is still suggested to hire a printer to print the invitations.

First of all no all paper can be used with your printer at home. You printer probably cannot handle paper over certain thickness. Besides, some of the paper cannot be used with the ink of toner of your printer. On the other hand, if you would like to have some special colors such as fluorescent colors or metallic colors, there is no way to print these colors at home. In this case the only choice is to hire a professional wedding invitation printer.

You may plan to make your own wedding invitation design using your PC and give the computer files to the printer to have the print job done. In this case you have to communicate with your printer for all the necessary requirements. Some examples will be the resolution of the images required (usually 350dpi) and the format of the file (CMYK instead of RGB format).

Die-cutting

Die-cutting is not a printing process but a post printing process. In fact, all the techniques that are going to be discussed below will be post printing processes. With the technique of die-cutting, you can make beautiful "cutting-out" on your wedding invitation. However, if you are thinking of very fine and delicate patterns, die-cutting cannot be used. In this case you will need to go for the option of laser cutting. With laser cutting you can make very fine "cutting-out" but that will probably increase the cost of production.

Besides laser cutting, any technique related to laser is laser marking. With laser marking, patterns can be "marked" on the paper. The effect of laser marking varies from material to material. For some paper you can see the marks on the paper and for some out kind of paper, you can only use you hand to feel the marks.

Hot Stamping and Emboss

On your wedding invitation, you can also have some patterns embossed such that people can feel the patterns with their hands. One of the common application of emboss on invitation card design is embossing the logo or monogram of the couple. Apart from emboss, hot stamping is also a common technique that will be used in producing wedding invitations. You can choose the color of the hot stamping foil and some of the common colors are gold, silver and purple. Couples will usually choose foils with shiny effect since the invitation will look more elegant this way. The most common application of hot stamping the contents of the wedding invitations, normally couples will have the words on the cards hot stamped instead of printing.