Tips & How To’s To Make Your Life Easier
- How To Specify Colour
- Image Resolution Tips
- How To Create A PDF File
- Supplying Fonts
- Supplying Images
How To Specify Colour
There are 3 common methods of specifying different colours: RGB, CMYK and Pantone. What's the difference?
RGB – the combination of Red, Green and Blue light – is how your computer monitor or television project images.
CMYK – the combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – is how printers mix those colours to produce images which are viewed using reflected light (rather than projected light, like your computer monitor). If you are submitting your files for full-colour reproduction, this is the colour format you should use!
Pantone© colours refer to the Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary colour space used in a variety of industries, primarily printing. The idea behind the PMS is to allow designers to 'colour match' specific colours when a design enters production stage – regardless of the equipment used to produce the colour. Specifying a PMS colour is a highly effective way of ensuring the colour accuracy of your printed materials.
Image Resolution
A very important item to consider when reproducing your images in print format is the resolution of the original image!
Most image files are saved as a sequence of "dots" – also called pixels or points – with each dot having a specific colour value. When these dots are placed together in sequence, they create a picture. However, the size of the dots has a big impact on how the picture looks.
If you have a small image on your computer screen that is 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall, that image will usually appear to be approximately 1.5" in size, and the quality will be good. However, if you try to stretch those same 100 pixels to 5" by printing it on your computer printer, each dot will become bigger, and the image will look more jagged around each of those dots.
Always start with the highest resolution image possible. Most digital cameras sold today have at least 5 Megapixels of resolution, which will produce an acceptable 8x10 image. If you need to produce images that are larger, you will need much more detailed images to begin with in order to achieve desirable results.
Images captured from a website are almost always too low in resolution to be used in printed materials, and quite often are copyright protected.
How To Create A PDF File
PDF files (Portable Document Format) are cross-platform files which embed imagery and font information in order to accurately reproduce the files on all computing platforms. This is the most effective and trouble-free way to send your documents to Hoppy Copy.
There are a number of methods you can use to create PDF files. For businesses and individuals who will be creating PDF files often, you may wish to consider purchasing Adobe Acrobat software from Adobe.com.
If you are using the MacOS platform, choose File -> Print while viewing your document, and from the PDF button (lower-left of the print dialogue) select Save As PDF.
For limited requirements, you can use the free Create PDF feature on the Adobe website, available at http://www.adobe.com/acom/createpdf.
Fonts
If you are supplying a document to be printed in a format other than PDF or EPS it may be necessary to include all fonts used.
Supplying Images
If you are supplying a document to be printed in a format other than PDF or EPS you must include all images used. If you do not supply the actual graphic file, the computer will only read the screen display image, which is a low resolution representation of the graphic file. The end result will be an inferior quality reproduction.