Pictures off the Internet

Some customers provide us with images that have been downloaded from the internet,
which are generally low resolution images intended for screen viewing, not printing.
These will always print out blurry, jagged and will give you a poor quality print.

Avoid using them if at all possible.

Images

Unless you have a carefully calibrated monitor, go by numbers and colour swatches,
not by how the job looks on the screen!
Save your images as CMYK, not RGB. RGB images usually print with flat, lifeless colour.
If the same image is used at different sizes in the one document, it should be cropped,
resized and saved for each use. Cropping to a small part of a large image can slow down
job processing substantially.

Don't paste into picture boxes - import and place files.

Photo Tips

Always select 'Use Printer Defaults' when saving PhotoShop files. This will remove the possibility of individual images printing to a different screen ruling (usually more coarse!)
than the rest of the document Pictures with compression cause problems.
If you must use compression, use JPEG, but be aware that the more you compress the worse the picture will print. Don't reduce a photo or scan to less than 20% of the original size when placing in a page layout program. Open them in an image editing programme such as Photoshop and scale them to the correct size.

Scan or save colour and greyscale images at 300 dpi at 100% of the final size Scanned line art needs to be no more than 800 dpi at 100% of the final size.

Microsoft Word & Publisher documents

Microsoft Word and Publisher documents have a nasty habit of reflowing the text and changing line or page breaks when a file created on one computer is opened on another. Embed all fonts in your Microsoft Word or Publisher documents before transferring it to us for output.

A way of guaranteeing your job outputs as you expect is to provide us with a PDF file
distilled from you Word or Publisher file.

Supply of a printing job

If you are supplying a job on CD please also send a hard copy and a folded dummy of
your job for checking. If you are supplying a job by Email please also fax a hard copy
of your job for checking.

Please just supply single pages set to the correct trim size(e.g. A4 on an A4 page, not an A3 page). Don't use PDF Maker for making PDFs to print - they are rarely acceptable quality.
Most other mainstream applications produce good-quality PDFs when "High Quality", "Print"
or "Press" settings are used.

When you supply material on disk for Printing to output, please supply only files relevant to the job or jobs. Remove all others. Please put all files required to output a particular job in one folder. Don't use separate folders for graphics. The reason for this is that when you copy the job from your computer to your removable disk, you break the link established between your layout file and associated graphics files.
This can be a time-consuming process to reconnect with potential for error.