But it looked great on my inkjet

In the course of our day-to-day business, we get a lot of questions about print and why things can look good on an inkjet or laser printer in the office but look strange when it is sent out to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or by a printer.

Well, the sad truth is that printing material on a press is a lot more complex than printing it on your own printer. Files have to be in certain formats and a lot of variables have to fall into place for an ad, business card, stationery or any other printed material comes out correctly.

Here's a brief tutorial on some of the factors and what you'll need to make a print project run smoothly.

1. It's all in the dpi...
You have a photo or a logo that needs to be printed. Now what do you do? There are two basic sizes of images and both are expressed in dpi (dots per inch). For files that are going to be used on a computer, the file size should be 72 dpi. This size, also expressed as pixels per inch is a measure of display sharpness. Printed materials also use dpi as a standard, but this is measure refers instead to the printed image quality on paper. Printers require images to be scanned or reproduced at 300 dpi. What if you have a 4" x 5" print scanned at 72 dpi that you want printed? Well, on your inkjet it will come our as a 4" x 5" print. If it is printed on a press, it will be the size of a postage stamp.

2. File formats
When creating a printed piece, files need to either be in .tif format or .eps format to reproduce properly. What's the difference? Files saves as .eps can be scaled infinitely from small to gigantic without losing quality. However, they can be tricky to format and save and can get a little corrupted if moving files between PCs and Macs (which most designers use). We use a lot of .tif files. While they can't be scaled infinitely, their quality is always consistent.

3. Fonts
Oh, here's a tricky area. Say you've designed something yourself and you've sent it to the printer. He returns a proof to you but it doesn't look quite right. The primary reason is that the printer doesn't have the fonts you used to design the piece. When you send a printer a file, they need all the original images and the fonts used in the piece you want printed. Otherwise, you may get some unpleasant surprises.

4. A colorful problem
Colors are expressed in a number of ways. A four color piece is often referred to in terms of CMYK, the colors of ink a press uses to print full color (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). The other way to create printed pieces is to use PMS colors. These are standard colors that can be used in place of full color. If you're doing a two color piece, say black and red, then the red color will be a PMS color. There are thousands of them and PMS is used not only in print pieces, but also in everything that's made. Even your sofa color is a PMS shade.

5. Pick me! Pick me!
Before you get anything designed, whether you're savvy enough to do it yourself of you get a pro to do it, make sure that you or your designer has covered the basics with the printer who will be printing the job. Most designers can recommend printers and gather estimates for you before starting work. The reason this is so important is that every printer preps files differently to match their press and prepress operations. This includes the size of bleeds (the amount of space that needs to be left around a printed piece to allow for ink to go to the edge of the final piece), the software formats they work with (Freehand, Illustrator, PageMaker, InDesign, Quark, PhotoShop, etc.) and how they want the finished files formatted (as .pdfs, .eps, native files with fonts converted to paths, etc.) This saves a lot of time and money in the process.

Got more questions? Give us a call and we'll be happy to answer them for you. Call (360) 895-6073, ext. 1 or (877) 895-2848, ext. 1.