Four color printing is no phenomena. It is the printing process that printers use in order to reproduce your designs. Such that, it is able to generate various hues that will fully capture your photos, illustrations and other design elements.
Printing companies go at lengths to measure your designs and files that it will print as closely as possible to the original ones. Through proofs, printing companies review if there are major flaws in your files.
Proofing your files, as some companies offer for free, is the job of experts which will study the details of your design. They try to see which problems might occur if you chose to print your design, this may be any of the following:
• which colors might come out drastically different
• which images may become blurry
• which images might be cut out
• which text may not be legible
Hence, knowing how to fully understand the requirements of a full color printing job just might put you back on the right track and avoid problems. Such delays would only cause you too much time, worry and effort.
Needless to say, you can take advantage of four color printing by following certain steps and measure. A good design will not print well, even with four color printing, if you do not know the most traps and pitfalls committed by many amateurs.
Using Scanned Photographs
Even when you scan your photographs, sometimes these files don’t come out the way you want them. The best you can do is to brush them up with a few strokes from design software.
Nevertheless, it is best to save such scanned files or images in tif or eps formats. Such formats help retain the original colors of your photographs and preserve the clarity or sharpness.
Also, keep in mind to use a resolution of 300dpi or dots per inch. This gives your pictures a smooth and sharp quality.
Web-based Images
Lifting or borrowing images from other websites are not always printable. Most images you find on the web are only set at 72dpi which would look very blurry or fuzzy if your tried printing it.
Your photographs, no matter how colorful, will lose definition. This means that lines, contrasts and shapes of objects will not be reflected on print. Colors suffer too because without high resolution, colors will not blend well and will look scattered.
Upsampling
You cannot come up with a good print if you have low resolution. Even if you stubbornly saved a 72dpi image to 300dpi without changing the dimensions, it won’t produce quality images. Also called upsampling, this shortcut would only prove useless.
Printing Text Colorful Text
Fonts should always be saved at 400dpi and yes it’s at a higher resolution. This is necessary for it to be printed well. This makes you text sharper and easier to read.
If you want a colorful font, there’s almost no limit to it. However, you may only want to have colored texts or fonts set at a minimum of 12pt. or else, there are chances smaller, colorful fonts won’t print as accurately.
Also, if you want to print white font against a dark background, make sure that it is also set at a minimum of 12pt. The dark background might dominate over your fonts and would prove of little or no use at all to read.
We all need colors, but in order to do so, we need files and images that would be printed well in the first place. For if we do not have the right files, everything will be compromised and all that effort spent will have been for nothing.
Make sure to consult with your professional printing company and see how you could improve your design, images and colors. Make four color printing an experience you can enjoy by remembering these tips.
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