Dear Customer,

This fortnight, we have some important technical tips for you. You will find these information most useful when preparing artwork for printing.

TECH TIPS

What types of images will work ok?
Scanning
Digital camera images
Will my printed piece look exactly like it does on my computer monitor?
Caution: It's Best If You do the RGB-to-CMYK Conversion of Your Images!
It is possible to make colours in RGB that you can't make with CMYK
What is Resolution or DPI?
What are Bleeds?
Rich black
Gradients
Vector Versus Rendered Images
Creating outlines
Embedding files
Die-cutting
Getting to grips with paper sizes

We have more tips on our website. To find out more, click here.

What types of images will work ok?
If you are scanning the images yourself from photographs it is better to save them in either tif, or eps format. These image formats will preserve the color and sharpness of your pictures the best. File formats like gif or jpg compress the pictures color and pixel resolution and this can cause color shifts and blurriness. Since jpg and gif are the most predominant image formats on the web, it follows that it's not a good idea to simply lift an image from someone's website and use it in your layout.

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Scanning
You should scan your images using a resolution of 300dpi at the final dimensions you intend to use them so that your colors will look smooth, and hard objects will look sharp. In other words don't scan at 300dpi and then enlarge the picture by 200% in your layout program! This is another reason why you should not use images that are lifted from websites; they are probably only 72dpi in resolution and will look very blurry if printed on a printing press. See our Resolution page for more information on resolution.

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Digital camera images
If you are using pictures from your digital camera they will work just fine if they are jpgs; the quality of jpg images from digital cameras seems to be much better than jpgs that are used on the web. You must do the math to make sure that it is high enough in pixel resolution though. For instance, if your camera puts out a typical image of 1280 x 960 pixels at 72dpi you get about 45cm x 33cm of photograph (at 72dpi); this is the same amount of detail as an image which is 10cm x 8cm at 300dpi so it's safe to reduce or enlarge that image in Publisher up to about 10cm x 8cm in dimension.

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Will my printed piece look exactly like it does on my computer monitor?
There are some small differences. Scanners and digital cameras create images using combinations of just three colours: Red, Green and Blue (called "RGB"). These are the colours that computers use to display images on your screen. But printing presses print full colour pictures using a different set of colours: Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Black (called "CMYK"). So at some stage your RGB file must be translated to CMYK in order to print it on a printing press. This is easily done using an image editing program like PhotoShop or Corel PhotoPaint.

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Caution: It's Best If You do the RGB-to-CMYK Conversion of Your Images!
You will have more control over the appearance of your printed piece if you convert all of the images from RGB to CMYK before sending them to us. When we receive RGB images, we do a standard-value conversion to CMYK, which may not be perfectly to your liking. We want you to be happy, so please, take the time to prepare your file properly. We cannot be responsible for sub-par results if you furnish low-res images or RGB images.

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It is possible to make colours in RGB that you can't make with CMYK
They are said to be "out of the CMYK color gamut". What happens is that the translator just gets as close as possible to the appearance of the original and that's as good as it can be. It's something that everyone in the industry puts up with. So it's best to select any colors you use for fonts or other design elements in your layout using CMYK definitions instead of RGB.

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What is Resolution or DPI?
DPI stands for (dots per inch). If you have a picture/scan within your layout/graphic program, remember that the resolution (DPI) must be correct. For a good quality image to print properly, the DPI (AT THE PRINTED SIZE) needs to be at least 300dpi.

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What are Bleeds?
When you do not want a white border on your printing and you want the image to extend beyond the edge of the page. Any time an image or a colour is printed to the edge of a page, the image or colour should extend at least 5mm off the edge so that when the page is trimmed on a mechanical cutter, small variations in the trim will not result in a white line down the edge of the page.

Rich black
When you want an area of solid black within the document, 100% black (K) is not enough; use Rich Black, which contains a CMYK mix of 220% as represented by C:40% \ M:40% \ Y:40% \ K:100%. Do not use higher values for C, M and Y; it will create an oily appearance instead of the saturated black you want.

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Gradients
Gradients are commonly used in printing and in most instances work fine. However, when a gradient is used it is crucial that it should be created in Adobe Photoshop, which has proven to give good results. Other programs produce gradients of less than 10%, which our RIPs will interpret as 0%. This results in banding or striping, which frequently makes customer's unhappy.

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Vector Versus Rendered Images
Vector drawings are defined mathematically. They are Resolution-Independent, so they can be scaled to any size with absolutely no loss of quality. Bitmaps are defined by their pixels, so they cannot be scaled to larger output size without loss of resolution.

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Creating outlines
When sending digital files to us where the original has been designed in a vector-based program such as Adobe Illustrator, you must create outlines. Outlines convert your fonts into a mathematical format. Outlining eliminates the need to send fonts along with your files while still achieving a nice crisp typeface.

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Enbedded files
One file for each product ordered please! We cannot accept files that have been laid out with multiple files/images in one side of a document. Please provide one file for the front and one file for the back for two-sided orders.

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Die-Cutting
If you really want your job to stand out in a crowd, ask about die-cutting. A "die" is a thin piece of metal bent into a particular shape that when pressed into a sheet of paper, it will cut whatever shape it is. We can create a die in just about any shape you would want.

When creating the files for a Die-cut order, remember to leave an extra 15mm of space around the file. This is called "GRIPPER SPACE." The die-cut machine needs this space to grab onto when cutting. In the gripper space you can't have anything you want printed in this area because it has a chance of being cut off. Make this area (gripper space) outside of the usable area of the file.

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Getting to grips with paper sizes
It is usefull to understand a little about standard paper sizes so that you can keep wastage with your print jobs to a minimum.

A Series
A Series is used for most types of general printing i.e. Stationary, publications, brochures and flyers etc. The most common sizes are A4 for stationary and documents, A5 for books and A6 for postcards.
Below illustrates the relationship between the diffrent A sizes. You'll see that all the sizes are in proportion to one another, with A0 being twice the size of A1, which in turn is twice the size of A2 and so on.

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