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Advice for Artwork

We want the same thing you want - to ensure that we print the document as you think it should be printed. The challenge is that what you think you want is not always what you give us. To help we have put together this section detailing the best format to supply your work.

PDFS

Composition

Composition is your choice of how you put your document together and generally you can do what you want, but there are a few things you need to be aware of:

The Page Size of your document will be automatically read when you upload, so you can chose any page size or shape you like, but generally these are the sizes you should work to.

• A1: 841 x 594
• A2: 594 x 420
• A3: 297 x 420
• A4: 210 x 297
• A5: 147.5 x 210
• A6: 105 x 147.5
• Compliment Slip: 210 x 99
• Business Card: 85 x 55

It is a good practice to leave a 'quiet zone' of 5mm from the edge of the paper. This will make your job look more professional and won't look like objects are about to fall off the edges.

Some of our products will be folded, like a DL mailer (i.e. A4 folded into third A4) so try to avoid folds going through images.

Bleed

When work is completed it is guillotined, if your colour goes right to the edge of the document, then the operator might need to cut into the document to ensure there is not a white line down the side. This may mean that your final A4 size might be 208 x 295, for example. However, if you include Bleed, which is usually an extra 3mm around the document that your colour runs into then the printer can give you exactly what you require. So an A4 would normally be 210 by 297, but a document with bleed (3mm) will be 216 by 303.  All your colour and images run into this “edge” allowing the printer to cut accurately and not have a white line down the print. If you like, you can include a 3mm bleed on your PDFs. When you upload your PDF go to the Advanced tab and tell the system how much bleed you have.

Colour

Your scanner and digital camera create images using combinations of just three colours, Red, Green and Blue, known as RGB. All our print is produced using high quality industrial digital presses. These print using four colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK, known as CMYK. Furthermore in traditional Litho printing, some inks are mixed specifically to match a colour, these are called Spot colours, usually taken from the Pantone swatch, just like a paint swatch. There are several challenges, first, regardless of what format you are using, it can only be seen on your colour monitor, which is RGB and unless it has been colour calibrated will not show you the exact colour anyway. Secondly, whilst our print process will automatically convert all colours to CMYK, it is not always possible to get an exact match. Lastly, colour will change depending on what paper (stock) it is printed on, gloss and laminated paper will make the colours look richer. Here are some tips to get the best out of your print:

• Try to avoid using very light tints of colour as these are prone to print much lighter than you expect.
• Try to avoid large areas of the same colour too, it will be very easy to see even the slightest colour variation. It is much better to use textures or images.
• Avoid using white (or light) text of less than 8 pt. on black (or dark) backgrounds.

Jpgs

The solution ONLY supports JPGs, the industry standard image format.

Overview

There are three main things that define the quality and size of a JPG:

• The size of image:  How big is the actual image, just like a photo, it might be 6x4 or it might the size of poster.
• The DPI: or dots per inch.  This effects the number of actual dots that make up the picture.
• The compression: JPGs are great because you can compress the images, but compress them too much and you lose quality and can cause issues with our software.

You can imagine a JPG image like a balloon with print on it.  If you blow the balloon up, the print gets stretched, it might distort and the colour becomes lighter.  Let the air out of the balloon and the effects are reversed.  Your JPG is the same, if you increase its size, it may distort and the colour might alter.  This is particularly obvious on straight lines and text.

An image may also look pretty good on a screen, but, look poor when printed.  This is because most screen resolution images are only 72 dpi, where are print is usually 300 dpi.

The problem can be as bad the other way though, you might take a digital image at 600 dpi, then shrink it by just dragging its corners (not how we are going to do it below).  The image, though it looks smaller, still has the same number of dots, so you may now actually have a 1200 dpi document.  Simply put, this means you are uploading larger images than you need, so uploads take longer, previews take longer.

The general guide lines for images are:

• Most JPGs need be no more than 200 Kb in size (exceptionally you might want them bigger if you are using them are very large print i.e. posters).
• The size of the JPG should be roughly the size that it will be used in the final artwork, for most of our work that 150mm wide by 100mm tall.
• The DPI needs only to be 250.

There is an explanation below of how to edit your images.

How FilePrint Uses Images

FilePrint has two solutions for images, photo uploads and images used in templates, here, we are focussing on templates.

If an image is used in a template, the designer will define a box, into which the image will go.  The image will scale up into the box until it meets an edge.  This can result in three things:

• The image and the box are the same proportions, which means the image will scale up and fill the box perfectly.  The box can be small or large, but the image will always fill it.
• The image is proportionally taller than box.  The image will scale up, until it hits the top/bottom of the box, there will therefore be a gap on the left and right of the image.
• The image is proportionally wider than the box.  The image will scale up, until it hits the left/right of the box, there will therefore be a gap at the top and bottom of the image.

Our designers try to ensure that the images still look good, even if they don’t fit.

Manipulating the Images

There are many different software solutions that allow you to manipulate images, Photoshop, Photopaint, etc.  Here we are using PaintShop Pro v10.

If you want to manipulate an image to ensure that it is in he correct proportion and size, do the following:

Remember are normal setting is a landscape image that is150mm wide, 100 mm tall, with a 300 dpi.

•   Open the image. This sample image is a portrait image, we will change to our landscape
  
  

• Select the crop tool.
  
  

• Enter the Width and Height, make sure you have set the scale to Centimetres.  You may find that the software actually enters 9.9999, but that’s OK.
  
  

• Grab any corner and resize the Crop box to show the part of the image you want.  You can also move the box around by pressing your left mouse button anywhere on the lighter area. You should find that the box will stay in the same proportion.
  
  

• When you are happy, double click inside the crop box, i.e. the lighter part of the image.  You should now only be able to see the part of the image that you want.
  
  
  

• You can now set the DPI, chose Image, Resize from the menu and this dialog box appears.  Set the resolution to 300 if it is not already 300. Then click on OK.
  
  
• Finally, click on File, Save As, and make sure that you select JPGs and that the file ends JPG, not JPEG.  Also on the options tab ensure you use only “Standard Encoding”.  That’s it, your done.