Tag: CMYK

How To Prepare Your Art For Color Printing

Tips To Ensure Your Art Is Ready For Online Printing

If you are planning to print a project, whether it’s business cards, flyers, or banners, it’s important to prepare your art properly before sending it to the printer. Preparing your art correctly for printing can save you time, and money, and ensure that the final printed piece looks exactly as you envisioned it. 

In this blog, we will cover some essential tips on how to prepare your art, including the differences between RGB, CMYK, and spot color, what bleed is, and how to know if you need to provide it for printing purposes, also what DPI is and what is required for printing.

Color Printing, Printing

RGB vs CMYK vs Spot Color

Before sending your art to the printer, it’s essential to understand the differences between RGB, CMYK, and spot color. RGB refers to red, green, and blue, which are the primary colors used in digital devices such as computer screens and cameras. 

On the other hand, CMYK refers to cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, which are the primary colors used in the printing process. When designing your art, you should always use CMYK color mode, as it’s specifically designed for color printing. 

Spot color, on the other hand, refers to printing with premixed ink in a specific color, often used for corporate branding or when a specific color is required.

Preflighting Your Art

Preflighting your art is a crucial step in preparing your art for printing. Preflighting ensures that your art is error-free and ready for printing. You can preflight your art by checking the following:

  • Are all the images and fonts embedded?
  • Is the art in CMYK color mode?
  • Is the resolution of the art at least 300 DPI?
  • Is there enough bleed?

What Is Bleed?

Bleed refers to the extra area of your art that extends beyond the final size of the printed piece. If your finished piece should have ink touching the edge, a bleed must be added. 

Say for instance that you are printing an 8.5×11 flyer, if the ink goes to the edge, the flyer has to be printed on a larger piece of paper and then trimmed down to ensure that there are no white edges around your printed piece. 

You should always add a bleed of at least 0.125 inches on all sides of your art.

What Is DPI?

DPI stands for dots per linear inch, which refers to the number of dots that a printer can place in one inch of space. When designing your art, it’s important to ensure that the resolution is 300 DPI. This will ensure that your art looks sharp and clear when printed.

Online images are set up to be 72 DPI, a much lower standard than required for color printing. Say you grab your company logo from your website and place it on a brochure you are designing. On your monitor, it will look fine. However, when printed on paper, that logo will come out blurry and low-resolution. It will also look off because online art is in RGB color mode, not CMYK.

Color Copies USA – Your Online Printing Company

If you’re looking for a reliable online printer, look no further than Color Copies USA. We provide complete printing services, including color copies, business cards, mailing campaigns, and printed materials for tradeshows and events. 

With our state-of-the-art equipment and experienced team, you can be sure that your printed pieces will look professional and high-quality. For all your printing needs, remember to turn to Color Copies USA, your reliable online printer.

If all of this is a bit overwhelming, don’t worry. We have online tools and templates to help. Our team of graphic designers is also available to create beautiful custom-designed material for whatever you need. Click here to request a custom quote or give us a call at 1-877-421-0668.

How to Prepare Your Files for Successful Printing

CMYK Rollers On A Printing Press, Print File Preparation

Get Your Printed Pieces Back Without Errors
You’ve spent all day – sometimes days or even weeks working on your project and when it comes back from the printer it doesn’t look like you expected it to. Sound familiar? It happens more often than you might think. In this blog post about preparing your files for successful printing we’ll cover are some easy steps you can take relating to CMYK, bleed and fonts for example ( see below ) to prevent printing problems from happening. Let us take you through some troubleshooting basics to ensure your next printing project turns out as great as you expected.

Color is Everything – CMYK

Let’s start off with color. We will use one of two processes to print your project – Full Color or Spot Color. Full Color presses use the CMYK process to create the final printed project while Spot Color uses just one ink color, the latter is mostly used when printing black ink on an envelope or something similar. More than likely your print job will need to be saved on your computer in the CMYK format. RGB color format is for use on a monitor only and the color will vary quite a bit if you save your art in RGB instead of CMYK mode, almost guaranteeing you will see a different color between what you made on your computer and the final printed piece. No matter what program you use to create your project, you should be able to easily change the color mode to CMYK. Most often it is in the Preferences section.

Color Tip: To ensure the black text in your file prints out dark instead of washed out gray, make the CMYK profile of your text 60 C 40 M 40 Y 100 K

What Do You Mean it Has to Bleed?

Bleed is a term that is used when your art has to print to the edge of the paper. In order to make this happen, we have to print the job on a larger size sheet then trim it down to the finished size. That means your art has to extend beyond the finished piece so we can trim off the excess. Adding .25 inches to the overall size of your project will ensure we can make that happen. For example: If your finished piece is 8.5”x11”, the file you send us should be 8.75’x11.25’ with the part of art going to the edge actually extending out to this new bleed area. Don’t forget to make any essential information like text stays within the finished size. A safe practice is to make sure text never gets within .25’ of the finished edge.

Why Did My Font Change?

The font you used to typeset your project might not be a font we have on our computer. Sometimes this causes the program to use a default font to replace the one missing from our system. There are two easy ways to make sure this doesn’t happen. If you are using Illustrator or a similar program, select your text and choose “Create Outlines”. If you are using Photoshop, flatten the artwork before saving. Just make sure you save the original project under a different name as both of these methods makes it so you cannot edit the text any longer.

PDF is the Way to Go

To help ensure you get a printed piece that looks correct, the file format you send should always be a PDF File. This is a universally accepted format that embeds more information into the file than most other files. Never send a file that needs to printed in the native software format i.e.; Word, Excel, Pagemaker, etc… No matter what program you use, you can save the art as a PDF.

Now that you have the basics of troubleshooting for printing problems before they happen – feel free to give us a call if you have any questions regarding print file preparation. We pride ourselves in producing high quality printing with complete customer satisfaction and would love to give you any advise to make sure that happens!