Trapping

What it means in packaging

It is a prepress adjustment made for the inks, substrate and print process. It differs from bleed, which handles cutting variation at the finished edge. Applying arbitrary overlaps can produce visible dark borders.

A practical example

A slight spread of one colour underneath a neighbouring colour can prevent a fine unprinted line when their positions vary.

What to check

Agree who applies traps and which settings they use, so the artwork is not trapped twice.

Use it in your project

• Print checks and production exports
• Place artwork and manage layers

Related terms

Bleed

Bleed is artwork extended beyond the intended cut boundary so small cutting variations do not expose an unprinted edge.

Overprint

Overprint is a print instruction to retain underlying colour when another object is printed over it.

Spot colour

A spot colour is a named colour separation handled independently from process colour channels in a print file.