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PRINTING BASICS GUIDE

Or how do I prepare an image to be printed

Contents:

1. Introduction………………………………1

2. Pictures (types & settings)……………..2

3. Color models…………………………….3

4. Making the picture………………………4

1. Introduction

During my AIESEC experience I’ve seen a lot of printed materials, like posters, t-

shirts etc. Every direction or project wanted own cool t-shirt. So they spent whole

FTMs/OCMs to brainstorm the idea of what will be printed on the t-shirt, suggesting

crazy things. But students of economics (and they are majority in AIESEC) are usually

not that good in drawing pictures or making them in graphic editors. So often I was

asked to help to prepare t-shirt models for printing. They told me: “Vlad, we got an

excellent idea! Here you have that picture 340x200 please make a t-shirt image out of

it!”

So I had two options – to redraw (or ask somebody to redraw if it is too complicated

for me) the picture, or to explain many times that you can’t print low quality picture in

desired size.

With this guide I’d like to share the basic knowledge about printing so that people,

who will be working on making any printing production, having no XP in this sphere

before, would know with what to start.

Remember – if you print – you must print quality!

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2. Pictures (types & settings)

First of all, forget about MSPaint! This is good only for children under 3 years old to

draw Picasso-style pictures.

Please, use at least Photoshop. If you are making printing production with lots of

text, you might want to try out InDesign, or if you are making logo – Adobe Illustrator or

Corel Draw. But in this guide I will only consider usage of Adobe Photoshop.

There are two types of images: vector and raster.

Vector graphics is a type of picture, where the image is defined by mathematic

functions. This type of pictures is preferable for printing, as it can be resized as much,

as you want without losing quality. Try to zoom this PDF-file in – and you will see that

the text will remain smooth. Now find any picture in the Internet and try to zoom it in.

You will see big square particles of same color. This is raster pixels.

Raster pictures are made of matrix of pixels. You

have seen the sizes of pictures like 1600x1200,

1024x768 etc. it means, that that picture is a grid of

dots of different color that has size 1600 pixels in width

and 1200 pixels in height. If you will print low quality

picture you will be able to see this grid on the paper as

well.

Vector pictures are really good for logos,

monochrome pictures or pictures with not many different colors. But complicated

pictures, such as photos, cannot be vector. Therefore you will have to deal with that

raster grid. So how to make it not appear on the paper?

When you are designing a t-shirt, poster or whatever, most likely you will design an

A4 or A3 format paper. It could be not so, but my advice will work anyway.

When you start new image in Photoshop, he asks you for the parameters of an

image.

Width

Height

Resolution

Color model

You may just choose the international standard size (e.g. A4 = 210x297 millimeters)

or set your own. You better set the image size not in pixels, but in millimeters (centimeters,

inches etc.) if you know exactly what size you want to print. And you’d better know,

because if you don’t – it will be hard to know what resolution you need. You may just make

very big image, because you can make it smaller to print without losing quality, but you

can’t make raster image bigger without losing quality. (And Photoshop is raster only editor)

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Once you know and you’ve set the size of the future image, you must set the

resolution. The dots per inch (DPI) characteristic of an image. It is used for printing. It sets

how many dots of ink printing machine will put on the paper for a linear inch.

What you must understand is that the best printing quality is when 1 ink dot

represents 1 pixel of an image. 300 DPI is enough for human eye not to notice that printed

picture is a grid. (If you are making a huge big board for street advertisement, you may put

lower DPI, as people will look on it from far distance – but not lower than 72 DPI)

You may just remember that you always set 300 DPI for printed pictures.

When you’ve put width, height and DPI – it will define the size of the pixel grid of

your picture to be printed smoothly. For example, for A4 paper with 300 DPI it will be

2480x3508 pixels. Now it asks for color model.

3. Color models

From the numerous color models you must know about two of them. These are RGB

and CMYK.

Basically, RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color model is used for

pictures that will be displayed on a monitor. If you are making a

picture, that will not be printed and will only be used to view it on

computer – you may set RGB color model and a resolution that is

just enough to fit the monitor size (low DPI).

RGB mixes three basic colors to make all other colors. It can

show many shades of all colors and it is a good color model for displays. Usually, colors

are defined by three numbers from 0 to 255 that represent the amount of red, green and

blue color in the resulting color.

Second model is CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK) – it

is used for printed pictures as it represents the amount of ink that

the printing machine will mix to make the dot of a picture.

Therefore colors in CMYK are set by percentage of mixed inks.

The CMYK color model can show not as many colors as RGB

color model, therefore if you originally design the picture in RGB it

may look not the same when it will be printed, as the printing

machine will anyway convert RGB into CMYK.

So you better choose CMYK color model from the very beginning when you are

designing a picture that will be printed.

There is also an option about amount of bits. It represents how many bits will be

used to describe one color-channel (for example RGB = 3 color channels: red, green &

blue). It greatly influences on the file size, and you may leave the default value (for

example, if it is RGB: 8 bits per channel = 24 bits per pixel).

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4. Making the picture

Now, when all settings of the picture are set we are finally ready to start to make the

printed product model itself!

If you are able to draw everything by yourself – that’s awesome! Just draw on the

working space that appeared on your display and will be of high enough quality.

But I’m not always able to draw what I want by myself. So I had to make the model

from lots of different pictures downloaded from the Internet.

Using Google to find desired image you should also remember that you are looking

for HQ pictures. You can set preferences when googling images – so you better put BIG

pictures and also you may want to turn on the size signing. Choose good quality pictures if

you want your printed image to be good.

When you’ve downloaded an image and put it into working space of Photoshop –

see if its size fits you or it’s too big or too small. First two options are good for you. If it fits

– don’t resize it. If it is too big – make it smaller and it will be still HQ.

But if you stretch a smaller image to be bigger – it will lose its quality. You can do it,

but remember that it might become ugly if you stretch too much. So stretch only if the

original image size is just little bit smaller than you want.

Once you are done – congratulations! If you followed all the things I told here, simple

printed products such as T-shirts or posters will be good enough to represent the biggest

youth organization in the world!

Just don’t forget that if you will be printing on a regular laser printer – you need to

save few millimeters at the borders of the paper – they will be white, as it is set like that in

the printer (or you can try to find a place, where printers doesn’t have such setting, but

most of them have it)

And last advice – if you are printing something that is transparent or is quite precise

(such as schemes) – don’t save it in JPG picture format. It compresses the image in a way

that it blurs the edges of colors. Save in TIFF (it has an extra color-channel for

transparency and is not compressed) or even leave it in PSD format.

Good luck and let the start of your printing XP be successful! = )

Vladislav Lukyanenko AIESEC IN UKRAINE

LC LVIV, 2012