Preparing Your Artwork For Print

First up…

There are a couple of things to think about before you even get started on your design work. If you get the preparation right then you’re more likely to avoid problems further on down the line.

• Before you get stuck in yourself, consider getting your design done by a professional. There’s a reason that people who design full time spend all their free time reading and working through manuals, tutorials and other references on the tools of their trade; and that’s because the more techniques you know, the better your chance of creating something that really pops off the page and catches the eye.

• If you can, try and use a professional design program (we use Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign mostly, but there are others out there – try Quark for layouts or GIMP for photo-editing). Most companies will let you try their products for about 30 days without charging you, so if you’re doing a one off project it’s definitely worth downloading a trial. Avoid using Microsoft Publisher, Word, or Powerpoint (really, try and avoid using anything created by Microsoft…) These programs are great for writing letters or creating slideshows, but they’re just not built for making print-ready designs. Using the right tools will make your job (and ours!) so much easier, and will ensure that your print comes back picture perfect.

How we do it.

Whenever we get a design sent through to be printed we automatically check for a few crucial elements that will make sure that it’s ready for print. If you’ve already done the checks yourself you’ll know that we’re not going to find any problems, and that means that you’re sure to get your print back on time and looking great.

You’re going to need to be checking the following things (remember, you can always give us a call on (01865) 596 262 or get in touch via our contacts page if you get stuck!)

• Image Size

• Document Bleed

• Resolution

• Colour Space

• Print Marks

• Document Format

Image Size

If you’re getting an A6 flyer printed up, then obviously your design is going to have to be A6 dimensions (that’s 105x148mm). If you get this wrong then you can end up with white borders left around the edges of your design, or bits chopped off – not such a problem if it’s only an unimportant bit of background detail, but a bit of an issue if you end up losing your contact number or email!

Before sending us your design, check what dimensions you should have (you can give us a call if you’re not sure) and double check that you’ve made the design the right size. This is easy in Photoshop, just go to the toolbar at the top, select the ‘Image’ drop down menu, and click on ‘Image Size’. This will give you all the information you need.

To help you out we’ve actually put together a list of common paper sizes, names, measurements and free templates.

Document Bleed

Unfortunately, that’s not it for checking your image size… Professional printers run the paper through their presses at incredibly high speeds, and it’s not possible to get the cutting mechanism to chop in the exact space every time. Printers get around this problem by asking that all designs feature what’s called a bleed. The bleed is an extra space outside the print area which shouldn’t contain any important information (as it’s designed to used as a reference point for the cutting mechanism, and will get cut off). Usually you’ll just have your background extend a little outside the print space – literally ‘bleeding’ off the edge – so that the cutting mechanism knows where to line up so that it can give you a perfect finish.

The best printers out there won’t ask for more than a 3mm bleed on all sides, so it’s worth keeping this in mind as an industry standard. What it means practically is that you need to add 6mm to the height and width of your design to make it print ready (that’s 3mm on each side), so the A6 flyer we mentioned earlier would actually need to have the dimensions 111x154mm, even though it will end up being 105x148mm after it’s cut. Make sure that you don’t put anything important into the bleed area, like image details or text that you want to appear on the final product, just think of it as your insurance policy against poor print – you shouldn’t notice it, but if you neglect it you might end up with a nasty surprise!

Resolution

Whether you’re thinking about the design as a whole, or your thinking about specific image elements that go to make it up, you need to be sure that you’ve got a high enough resolution to be recognised by a printer. Commercial printers work by spraying tiny spots of ink onto the page, adding layers to build up the final colour in any given spot. Your resolution settings tell the press how many spots to spray across a given area (industry standard is an square inch), and the more spots you tell the printer to put into that space, the better your image will end up looking. Again, you need to go with the industry standard, which is 300 dpi (dots per inch), if you try to send something through that’s at a lower resolution this is what will happen:

Low resolution – eek!

Much better at a higher resolution!

Standard screen resolution is 72 dpi, and programs which aren’t specifically built to create print ready images will often assume that this is the resolution you want to use when you start, so always make sure that you’ve manually set the resolution to 300 dpi before you send off your design. Resolution and print size are linked together, so be keep an eye on the size of your document when you adjust resolution, otherwise you’ll end up with something teeny that can’t be printed! You can read our article on pixels, dpi and print resolution explained, but generally just remember that your artwork needs to be the right size (including bleeds) at 300 dpi for it to be print ready. It’s not as complex as it looks, but give us a call on (01865) 304 071 if you get stuck!

To check the resolution in Photoshop, go back to the ‘Image Size’ menu that we looked at earlier and look in the field called ‘Resolution’, if it’s not 300 then you need to change it so that it is, which may mean changing your design to make it the right size after you’ve got it to the right resolution – another good reason to make sure that you’ve set the right resolution before you start working! Make sure that the tick box called ‘Resample Image’ is unticked before you change the resolution, otherwise Photoshop will try and automatically fill in the spaces between pixels when it changes the resolution. You’ll know if this happens, because it will look dreadful on screen!

Colour Space

Asking about “colour space” is just a fancy way of asking whether you’re going to be using your design online or in print. Images viewed on screen are made up of a mixture of Red, Green and Blue coloured light, so the colour space for onscreen images is called RGB. Printed images, on the other hand, get their colours from mixing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks, so they use the CMYK colour space (we know what you’re thinking, ‘K’ stands for ‘Key’)

Changing between the two colour spaces can produce some major shifts in how a colour appears, since the RGB colour space is capable of showing many more shades than CMYK. To avoid a shock when you get your print back, make sure that you’ve set the colour space of your design to CMYK before you send it off. To do this in Photoshop go to the ‘Image’ menu on the toolbar and select ‘CMYK Colour’ from the menu. As ever, it’s best to do this right at the beginning of your project, so that you avoid any problems later on.

Print marks

Some programs (including Adobe InDesign) will give you the option to include what they call ‘Printers Marks’ when you’re saving the image to send to a printer. It might seem like this is a good idea - after all, you’re sending the design to a printer, and these are marks for a printer, so why wouldn’t you include them? The short answer is that you should only include printers marks if you’ve been specifically asked to; otherwise you’re actually only sending through extra information that your printer doesn’t need, and that they’ll have to spend time getting rid of. At Pulse Print we don’t usually ask for printers marks to be included, and if we do need them we will always tell you when you’re placing your order.

Document format

Last, but not least, you need to decide how you’re going to supply your design to your printer. Printers will need a ‘flat’ image (one where none of the elements are editable any more, as they’ve all been fixed in place) to work from, which means you’ve got a choice between PDF and JPEG. Most printers will be happiest accepting a PDF, although you can usually supply a JPEG if that’s your only option – the key is to ask which is best. Whichever you pick, make sure that you’ve saved it at the highest possible quality before you send it off to the printers.

Flattening an image is a lot like taking a collage, where all the bits and pieces that make up the image as a whole can be moved around, and pressing a sheet of glass down over it, so that they’re fixed in place. To get your artwork flattened in Photoshop, head up to the toolbar and select the ‘Layer’ drop down menu. ‘Flatten Image’ is one of the menu options towards the bottom of the list; select it, save your document and you’re good to go!