Print Tips

The following print tips are for your benefit. You will find useful information that will help you with getting your print job done in an efficient and cost effective manner.  Check back frequently for updates!

• Work with your printer at the inception of a project. Consulting a printer at the early part of a job will usually save you time, money & frustration.
• JPEG's AND GIF's are too low in resolution for commercial printing. As a general rule scan at 2400dpi for printing and save it as a TIFF
• Be aware of folding panels. Do your work at 100% the size of the printed piece and allow for proper margins where you want it to fold!
• Resize ALL halftone and four color scans in PhotoShop or any other paint program. Resizing in the page programs or draw programs can lead to long imaging (RIP) time (and therefore cost more money). DO NOT compress the scans in PhotoShop! Export scans or graphics at the size they will print.
• Want To Make A Photo Look Old Or More Interesting-try a vignette. It creates an old-fashioned look and can be helpful in cropping out unwanted parts of an image.
• Save Time By Rotating Your Images Before Printing. This is because when the document is printed, images rotated in the page-layout application create additional work for the computer and printer and take a lot longer to image than ones placed un-rotated. It can be very time-consuming and memory-intensive.
• Avoid missing images by getting a preflight utility program that collects images in addition to fonts while checking your files for other problems.
• Get a deep, rich black on your printing. Use the following CMYK values for black (do not use for small text)

  Cyan - 40%,
  Magenta - 40%,
  Yellow - 20%,
  Black - 100%

  For small text:
  Cyan - 0%,
  Magenta - 0%,
  Yellow - 0%,
  Black - 100%
  

This technique will give you a deep black where you have heavy black ink coverage on your printing.