The printing industry depends on state of the art , equipment, software, and hardware, advancing technology and good prepress skills. Professional Mailing & Marketing's printing department offers complete, typesetting, design and prepress services. With over 40 years combined printing experience we know what it is like to work under strict guidelines and pressuring deadlines.
We have complied this little bit of information for anyone to look at and use, it is here to help
improve efficiency, economy, and quality. Before you read on please take into consideration that there is allot more to this than meets the eye. These are just a few helpful tips and there
is tons of great information on the web that can be useful.
Images:
Never use images from the internet unless you have bought and paid for them. This
insures that there are no copyright infringement laws broken and that the image resolution
and quality are up to pare. Images on the web are usually 72ppi (pixels per inch/monitor)
which is not what we need for the printing industry. We require a minimum of 200dpi
(dots per inch/printed matter).
File Format:
The most common printing file format for photos is a tiff, eps, and sometimes a high res
jpg will do the trick. For other art work such as illustrations and logos an eps or vector format works best. These vector files allow us to scale images as large or small as we need to
without loosing quality. We work with all kinds of file formats from many different software
vendors, using advanced software insures great quality through out your project.
Colors:
This is probably one of the most crucial elements in the printing industry. Full Color/Four Color is printing colors using four colors to create all the colors in the color spectrum. These four colors are referred to as CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black), these are the colors that are laid on top of one another to create many different color variations.
PMS (Pantone Matching System) colors refer to single colors except for black, white and registration. There are many different PMS colors available.
RBG and sRGB is color that is used on a monitor or television screen. These colors are not the same as print colors, try to avoid these colors. Make sure that all your images and documents are in CMYK, this will improve quality through out the printing process.
When it comes time to choose colors, you'll need to decide how many colors your project requires. Are there any color photos included, if so then full color would be your choice. How about a grayscale image? A Grayscale image is one color Black, so then you might want
to add two or three colors to your project using PMS colors.
Packaging for Print:
From within InDesign, Quark and Publisher there is an option for packaging you files for print. These options gather all of your images, fonts, and other information into a central location (folder) of your choosing. We recommend using these features in your layout software, they
are wonderful tools that help prevent errors and speed up the printing process.
There is also another great way to get your files to us. This includes working with Acrobat
and Acrobat Distiller. From within most if not all layout and design software there is an option
to print as a pdf, save as a pdf or export as a pdf. These options do pretty much the same as above except that there will only be one file, which should look exactly the same as you see
in your layout software. All images and fonts are embedded into this document so that nobody needs to even worry about missing fonts or images. Using these features only requires that
you select the correct options in the dialogue boxes. Try not to sub-sample any of your images, use no compression and do not convert any colors to RGB or sRGB.
If you have any questions please give us a call at (605) 882-3365 or
toll free at 800-568-4344.
