Any things to make sure of before sending your items out for printing?

[clickhea]

iam pretty sure both my marquee and cpo are ready to be sent out for printing, andy last minute things to double check so that i dont end up with a 100 dollar mistake?

[Games001]

If it is being done locally, I suggest a 'proof' be sent to you to be sure of color or dimensions.

[clickhea]

gonna be using mame marquees

[BASS!]

I use to work for a printing company and would happy to take a look at it to check your settings. The things I always do before printing a document is.

Rasterize all text layers at 600dpi. If you do not do this large format printers often reinterperate fonts.

Make sure that your documents color profile is the same as what the printer uses. Printers almost always use a standard CMYK profile that is tailored to their printer. A good substitute is SWOOP. If you are using photoshop go to :

Image -->Color Settings :
go to the area and choose SWOOP V2 as your cmyk profile

Once you do this do a trial run. First save your document, and go to image --> Mode --> Choose CMYK. If you have already set your document to this then you are ready to roll. If you have not, I recommend going through and tweaking your document to make it look perfect under this.


The next thing you will need to remember to double check your size, as games001 posted. Go to Image --> Canvas size, and check that this is the same size that you want your document.

If all is well then you are set and ready. If you would like, I would not mind one bit to help you prepress your file before you send it off.

[clickhea]

id really appreciate if you could take a look at my psd files

where can i send them?

[clickhea]

btw mame marquees suggest leaving it in RGB mode

Artwork you create must be the correct size and it should be at least 200dpi, but 266-300dpi is preferred. Leave the document in RGB mode which has a broader color range. Do not create a file in a lower dpi and then convert it to 300dpi, this only makes the file bigger and does not enhance the resolution. It will still come out blocky and actually worse then if you left it at a lower dpi. Start creating at 200 or 300 dpi at full size, in other words, if you are creating a 300dpi marquee that will print at 26x8” create it at that size.

Design your artwork with the Marquee retainer in mind and leave a 1/2”-3/4” on the top and bottom empty.The file should be a .psd photoshop or .ai adobe illustrator file, or a .tif if using another program such as paintshop pro or Coreldraw.

[BASS!]

id really appreciate if you could take a look at my psd files

where can i send them?

Just go to www.yousendit.com and upload the file there, and put in my email : uprightbass360@gmail.com, I'll shoot you back a optimized tif and a PDF of the file:-)

btw mame marquees suggest leaving it in RGB mode

Artwork you create must be the correct size and it should be at least 200dpi, but 266-300dpi is preferred. Leave the document in RGB mode which has a broader color range. Do not create a file in a lower dpi and then convert it to 300dpi, this only makes the file bigger and does not enhance the resolution. It will still come out blocky and actually worse then if you left it at a lower dpi. Start creating at 200 or 300 dpi at full size, in other words, if you are creating a 300dpi marquee that will print at 26x8” create it at that size.

I do agree that you want to design a file at the resolution that you are going to print it at. If you are going to print it at 300dpi then there is no sense of designing it at a much lower resolution. On the other hand, if you make the mistake of designing the image at too low of a resolution, resizing it in photoshop always helps. Print rip ques often mess up files that it has to upsample too high. If you have a pixelated image, photoshop does work pretty good at softening them up a bit to a higher resolution. As far as doing your design in rgb, I am against that. Even though rgb has a better color gamut, and can display colors more vividly, printers do not print in rgb. A large format printer will either print in CMYKcm or CMYKb, meaning that they use Cyan, Magenta, K (cyan), Yellow, Light cyan + Light magenta or black. Since this is the color option that printers have, it just makes more sense in working with a color palate that you are going to use to print it with.

The one main drawback of using cmyk in photoshop is that alot of the filters will not work right, or will just not show up at all. So apply your filters and get all of the art ready, and apply cmyk when your all done, and tweak the file from there. Just my 2c:-)

[BASS!]

Files done, in the mail. Looks great! I included both Tiff and pdf for Scott to choose.