Chapters 8,9, and 10

CSR role: Your CSR will be an experienced print professional who can give you some insight into your job’s special needs. The CSR is the common contact point for jobs, and is expected to know everything about a job. So you don’t forget to inform them about everything.

Talking with the Printer:

Your first contact at the printing company will probably be with a salesperson. The sales person will gather your initial information and will provide you with an estimate of job cost and a propose timeline for the steps along the way. Those steps will include such events as when your files must be submitted, when you can expect the first proof, when the press run will take place, and when the final job will be delivered. Finally the salesperson will hand you and your job off to the customer service representative.

Planning for Print:

As your file takes shape, it’s important to build from the ground up. Next time you are about to create a file follow these important specifications:

 External document size: make sure you know the correct external dimensions before you go too far.

Adequate Bleed: 1/8^th of an inch of bleed is standard size but some print services providers may request a larger value.

Internal Plan Sizes: in your page-layout program, set up guidelines to help you position content. Your print service provider may be able to provide a template to use if you’re building a common size.

Artwork interactions with folds, perforations, or die cut trims: IF artwork stops at a fold, special handling may be required to ensure that it doesn’t dribble over onto the next panel. Your print service provider can provide some guidance for preparing artwork.

Correct number of pages: in a common format, multipage document, the number of pages should be divisible by four.

Correct Ink: if it’s not a 27-color job there shouldn’t be 27 spot colors in your application’s color palette. Delete unnecessary colors, or convert them to CMYK if they’re not intended to print as spot color.

Check Raster/Vectors:

Check raster images: it is important that your images are of sufficient resolution at final size, and that you’ve save the images in an appropriate format and in the correct color space. If the images you are creating are your final art, check them in Photoshop or the application in when you created them. Consult your printer service provider to make sure you know their requirements, but here are some general guidelines.

Resolution: raster images should usually be at least 300 ppi but there are some cases that it needs to be different.

Color space: Images usually come in one of five major flavors for printing purposes: CMYK, RGB, grayscale, monochrome, and duotone. Unless you’re working in a color-managed environment, you’ve be asked to provide CMYK images of color images. If your print service provider utilizes color management, ensure that you’ve tagged your RGB images with appropriate color profile. Make sure that grayscale images are truly black-only files, not gray-appearing RGB or CMYK images.

Retouching: if you are not comfortable performing retouching work beyond simple blemish removal, let the print service provider know that you’d like them to perform the work instead.

Rotating and scaling: if you’ve simply flipped an image horizontally or vertically in a page layout, rotated an image by 90-degree increments don’t worry about it. But if you rotate an image in a page layout by anything other than 90-degree increments you will see slight softening of detail in the final output.

Filenames: avoid using periods, asterisks, and other characters to flag files names. Even if you and your print service provider are both using Macintosh computers, remember that your file will probably be copied to a server that may be based on another platform such as Unix or Windows.

For vector artwork it is important to consider some of the same issues that you encounter page-layout applications. Don’t forget to check the following:

Correct colors: if you’ll be placing vector art into a page-layout program, try to avoid multiple instances of what should be a single spot color.

Images: Most illustration programs offer the choice of embedding or linked placed images. Embedding increases the file size and it ensure that all the pieces are in place. However, it may limit editing if the print service provider needs to modify the images.

Fonts: Note that while Illustrator enables the embedding of fonts with proper permission, this only facilitates correct images. The fonts are not available for text editing unless the user also has the font active on their system. If wanting to convert text to outlines, be advised that some text effects such as underlining or strikethrough may be lost when you outline the text. Font contains special information called hinting, which is lost when text is converted to outlines. Outlined text will not be as crisp as the original text when printed on a desktop printer.

Text: Spell-check content, and check for pesky little empty remnant of text where you unintentionally clicked with the Type tool.  Those empty instances may result in preflight reports of a font being needed; resulting in time wasted troubleshooting something that isn’t truly a problem.

Bleeds: If the vector artwork file is your final artwork, ensure that you’ve included adequate bleed, even though you created bleed artwork correctly, the export format that you choose in Illustrator determines whether that artwork is correctly retained during file export.

Types of proofs

The print service provider should give you some guidelines for submitting job files. Some prefer PDF files, while some would rather have application files such as QuarkXPress, InDesign, and Illustrator.

Resolution for output

The rule for image resolution is the same as for image size, because the concepts are intertwined. You can always discard information, but you can’t convincingly create it out of nothing. Generally speaking, 300 ppi at final size is sufficient for printing at 133-150 line screen. The resolution changes on the line screen, and other objectives.

Color space in PS & AI

Our eyes see in RGB. RGB is the native tongue for scanners and digital cameras as well.  Once you convert and image to CMYK for a given printing condition, you lose some flexibility. Keeping the image in RGB allow you to defer the conversion until later in the workflow, rather than locking you in to a particular print condition early in the life of the job.

Flatten or layered

Flatten layer is everything compressed into one layer. Layered is everything that was created on separate layers stays on separate layers.

Transparency is expressed in percentage opacity. The opacity of an object or layer is transparency.

Creating a path: Make Work Path tolerance setting on the Paths panel can soften the granularity of the generated path. Keep reloading the selection and experimenting with the tolerance setting since this function doesn’t offer any preview of the outcome.

Duotones: is composed of two colors usually block and a spot color.

AI Artboards: Represents an imaginary piece of drawing paper. This is the region that can contain printable artwork.

Bleed Settings: Bleeds can be asymmetrical, and can be up to one inch in depth. A good rule of thumb is 0.125.

AI Simplify complex art: modifies selected objects by reducing the number of points in those objects.

AI effects and clipping mask: the effects menu is divided into two sections – Illustrator Effects and Photoshop Effects. The Illustrator Effects are applied to the interiors and the edges of vector objects. Photoshop effects are applied only to the interior of vector objects.

AI linked and embedded images: linking an image results in a smaller Illustrator file that embedded. They are easily color corrected or retouched. You might expect embedding an image increases the Illustrator file size. While embedding makes it easier to keep track of all components of a file, it complicates image editing.

Information source: Adobe Creative Suite Applications, written by Claudia McCue.