Artwork Info

Printing digital images can be difficult because a screen quality image, which looks good on your monitor or phone, will often look jagged when you print it.

There are two types of digital images, vector images and raster images. Vector images are usually logos or line art graphics and can be enlarged or reduced in size without affecting the quality of the printed result. Most commonly used images, including digital photographs, are raster images, which means that they are made up of a number of dots. This type of image quality will vary depending on the size it is printed out at, because the image will have the same number of dots whether it is printed out 1 inch by 1 inch or 10 inch by 10 inch, only the size of the dot will change i.e. fewer dots per inch equals lower quality print.
All your graphics for printed publications should be a minimum of 300 dpi to print cleanly. For large format printing (e.g. posters) a minimum of 150 dpi is usually acceptable. A screen-grab or a saved web picture are usually only 72 dpi, which is screen quality only and will look awful if printed.

The quality depends on the dpi, once the file is created, i.e. a web graphic that is 72dpi, it won’t help you much to use software like Photoshop to increase the resolution to 300 dpi – you can’t add in what isn’t in the image in the first place, in short you have to get images that are high resolution from the start

Microsoft Office is the most common suite of programs used for creating documents for domestic printing, simply because that is what is available to most PC users. In order to preserve the look layout and type face of your document we strongly recommend you save the file as PDF

By default Microsoft Office will set to US letter size and PowerPoint to screen size this will clearly cause issues if printed on UK paper sizes, please check that all paper settings are set to the ‘A’ sizes. This needs to be done at the start of the set up of the job.

Although Word has an option to setup the document as a booklet please leave it as single pages and we can put the booklet together.

If you want edge to edge printing it is necessary to make the image 3mm bigger all the way round and keep any content within the finished page size. This will allow your job to be printed on a larger sheet size and trimmed back to the required finish size ensuring the image in fact does bleed off the page. This is called bleed and is essential as commercial print machines do not print edge to edge

It is important to remember that the colour you see on screen is not the same as what may print out. Screens show colour in RGB (red green blue) so if you have chosen what looks like a bright vibrant colour on your screen once converted to printing colour CMYK (cyan magenta yellow black) the colour can change dramatically. If colour is vital to you then please use a CMYK mixer chart when picking colours and ensure the colour profile is set to CMYK.

If you are sending big files please use a transfer website.

If you are concerned at all please do give us a call or pop in to see us.