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gogreen@barefootpress.com

We are happy to confirm that another step toward sustainable printing has been accomplished here at Barefoot Press. We reported earlier on our transition to process-free Fuji plates. Well, the plates are now in full production and everything went like clockwork.

Because these plates use no water, developer, or any other chemistry, they have totally eliminated all remaining environmental issues in our prepress department. We simply laser-image the plates on our Fuji DART platesetter and hang them on the press. The plates fall into register quicker, roll up to color quicker, and so far we have had no plate remakes due to a quality issue. Because they are made from a high grade aluminum they are just as recyclable as our last plates, but have none of the waste disposal issues related to the plate processor.

We are always looking for ways to improve our eco-friendly printing process. This is a big step toward sustainability, and it wasn’t inexpensive to implement. But the results are worth the investment and effort, and we are pleased to say we have the cleanest prep department a green printer can have. We are offering demonstrations, so if you are interested please drop us a line.

Image compression is a huge deal for a website. Long page load times can cause users to exit the browser. You have about 1.5 seconds before the user will leave the window.

There are ways you can save your slices to crunch them way down in file size and preserve the integrity of the image.

You should save an image as a .jpg if it has a photo in it or a complex background. Basically, anything that isn’t a solid color should get saved as a .jpg.

If you are using Photoshop’s Save for web, select 2-UP so you can see the original on the left and the one you’re editing on the right. Make sure the right image is selected and choose .jpg from the drop down menu on the right. I usually set my compression to 65. If your page isn’t graphics-heavy, you can go higher. Some images will show degradation at 65, so you may want to bump it up a little.

If your image is solid color, like our logo for instance, save it as a .gif. Solid color has no gradients or halftones, hence less colors. Think of it as a cartoon or coloring book. You have lines and shapes filled with solid color.

Go back to Save for web and get your 2-UP. Choose .gif in the drop down on right. Our logo is 1 color. I can go pretty low on the compression. I will usually bump it up to 8 or 16 colors to keep the text from looking choppy. Determine about how many colors you have in your slice and set the .gif compression to match. 256 is the highest you can go, unfortunately (which is why slices with photos in them don’t make good .gifs)

The file sizes will be much smaller when you save it in the right format. While you’re tweaking your compression levels, look under the image and it will show you the file size at the current settings. Sometimes, I’ll have a slice and can’t decide if it would be better as a .gif or .jpg. I’ll select one, then the other and see which one is smaller. That’s the one you want. The file size will be bigger if you make the format render something it’s not meant to.

Every site we do is hand cut and hand compressed. I take all of the slices in the beginning that are different. Figure out the format and compression and use that setting for each slice like it, carefully watching each one. Sometimes you need to give special attention to certain cuts to get the best result.

You can’t use your logo from the web to have printing done. Forget about it. Not even Chuck Norris can fix this issue.

You need to have the right resolution for print and web for best results.

Bitmapped images are made up of pixels, the smallest unit a computer can display data. When digitizing an image, you will need to select the desired amount of pixels per inch (PPI) or dots per inch (DPI), depending on what you want to do with the image.

Incidentally, PPI (web) and DPI (print) are interchangeable terms, meaning essentially the same thing.

Web = 72 DPI

Print = 300 DPI*

*You can go down to 250 DPI in some cases until the naked eye will see degradation in the image.

Large format printing is usually done between 100-150 DPI (posters, banners, tradeshow booths, billboards). Most large format printing is not meant for someone to be standing up close to it. Up close, the images will not look as sharp and you will see the dot from the print. But from a distance, the image will look fine. This is where vector art can come in real handy. Vector can go large format and always be crisp and produce fairly light files in comparision to bitmapped files. Unfortunately, most brands must have bitmapped images that must be integrated into print layouts.

I like to get my images as big as possible. Just when you think you won’t need it any bigger than “X”, you will need to stick it on a tradeshow booth and enlarge it 350%. When developing a brand, the logo is always vector to accomodate this and any images used are secured at the largest possible size to spread across other mediums later. This will save a whole lot of time and money by not having to go back and re-do artwork at a larger size or use different images that are big enough that may not have been your first choice.

During the printing of your piece, the paper can shift and your art will land in a slightly different place in relation to where it will be trimmed. To avoid this from being noticed on the final piece, always be sure to leave the room for this shifting in your layout.

Trim - The size that your work will be cut to.

Margin - The area around the outer edge of the piece to allow for printer shifting.

Live area - The area in the center, minus the margins where important info should remain, not going into the margin.

Bleed - The amount of artwork that needs to “bleed” off the edge, over the trim to account for printer shifting. Usually .125″ – .375″, depending on pub.

When you have specs for any print piece, you should always have the above 3 sets of measurements, 4 if you have a bleed. MANY pubs do not supply live area. I usually have to call them and ask what they want it at. Sometimes they don’t care, sometimes they don’t know what I’m talking about. When in doubt, I like to give it a nice 3/8″ (.375″) margin on a print ad that is around 8.5″ x 11″. If it is for an oversized pub, like Rollingstone, I’ll go up to 1/2″ (.5″).

A good printer can get up to 1/16 of an inch from the trim for things like business cards, maximizing your live area. For magazines, there must be a much wider margin – .25″ – .75″ from the trim – depending on the publication. Some publications will have different margins for the top and bottom (.75″) and left and right (.5″).

So, here is the formula: If you have an ad for a pub that is 8.5″ x 11″ at the trim and their margin is .375″, all four sides with a .125″ bleed, your live area goes down to 7.75″ x 10.25″.

In this live area is where you want to keep all of your text and important elements. The background (or anything that isn’t important and can be cut off) can extend out to the trim, into the bleed if your ad has one.

Leaving a decent sized margin has other benefits. It will keep your text from falling into the gutter. That is the center where the pub is bound together. If possible, try to guarantee left or right placement in the pub. That will allow you to know which side is going into the gutter.

This is especially important when you are doing a spread and your text jumps the gutter. Make sure you leave the margin space. It will look odd when you print it out, but if you put them together and pinch them in the middle to simulate binding, you will see the text come together.

If you do have a bleed on your print piece, make sure to account for it when designing.

I’ll get off my soap box now…

If you have ever lost vector art, listen up.

If you loose your native files (Illustrator, InDesign, Quark) and only have a .pdf of the work, you can put that .pdf back into Illustrator and anything that was vector in it’s native form will go back to such.

If the type was still in tact and not converted to paths, it will require some clean up, but all vector objects will be perfect (or as they were in the final file to the printer – some illustrator treatments require flattening or rasterizing, which you should have an editable version of these graphics to go back to).

As so many printers are now requiring single-page .pdfs for output, these are invariably saved as final files to the printer. Printers may have them on file and you may still have these files on your local drive should your server crash.

I have seen this happen. Massive amounts of data lost. Tears. Heartache. Despair. If you have those .pdfs, you will at least get back your precious vector art.

One of our FAVORITE topics.

Vector graphics are created with math as opposed to pixels like a bitmapped image. Pixels are heavy. Vector is very light. AND it’s infinitely resizeable. Your graphics will always be crisp at any size.

With that said, your logo should always be created in a vector-based program (Illustrator, Freehand, Korel) – NOT Photoshop. When a logo is created in Photoshop, designers can forget that this brand will need to cross over other mediums in addition to the lo-res webpage they’re creating it on. If they are mindful to use the vector shapes within Photoshop, that will help. But then you get into filters and such. There are things you can do in Photoshop that can’t be done in Illustrator (yet).

When a logo is created with these types of filters and treatments, the logo has trouble going to a larger size and has to be re-done to accomodate.

In addition to this issue, you run into a busy logo. Simple graphics and easily read type are crucial.

Consumers must have the same positive experience each time they come in contact with your logo, they must also have the same image of the logo reinforced each time they see it. In fact, in today’s sea of technological advertising, a person must see an image, such as a logo, at least seven times before it registers. If, during those seven times the image appears differently, the preceding viewings are canceled out; and the individual must see the image an additional seven times for it to register.

Stay true to your brand and it will stay true to you!

Have you ever had a logo created and then tried to have it printed, only to find out that it looks like crap? Well, dry those eyes. There is help.

Any time you have a logo created, it should be created in vector-based format (we’ll get into vector-based objects and their value tomorrow… stay tuned). The relevance here, when dealing with color is… Creating your logo in vector will allow it to go from print to web flawlessly. Photoshop doesn’t maintain true Pantone values and can skew your color slightly. Even being just a few numbers off can create a bad color situation.

Pantone colors are a set of colors that can go from spot (RGB) to 4C process (CMYK) without as much variation between the conversion from RGB to CMYK than if you just went into your color pallette and started mixing colors willy nilly. When you break down a color to 4C process, you loose saturation. You only have 4 colors that need to make up thousands or millions of colors, so there will be variation in your color when the conversion takes place. Pantone colors reduce the amount of variation.

They have swatch books that you can flip through to pick your colors and see how they will look once they are converted to CMYK. You can pick your brand colors with knowledge before the logo is created and be able to sleep at night.

Sometimes all we have is a bad image to work with. That’s the reality, unfortunately.

Whether you have to enlarge an image above 100% of it’s actual size or if you are trying to fix a blurred image, unsharp mask in Photoshop is a life saver.

.jpg compression is another issue that can rob you of your clarity. Over-compressed images look bad and sometimes are all we have to work with.

When I am trying to fix an image, I will run my unsharp mask after a good color correcting. My primary setting is:

Amount: 400%
Radius: .2 pixels
Threshold: 0 levels

Sometimes, I will go up to a .3 on the radius, but only if the image has been very degraded and needs a little extra sharpening. Sometimes it can further damage the image, so be careful.

With this recipe, I can create images that are always crisp. Even when you reduce the size of an image, it blurs the pixels slightly.

Reduce a large image to 300 wide. You will see the best results by using an image of a person. Unsharp Mask sharpens edges, not the whole image. Now run an unsharp mask on it and toggle back and forth with your undo keys. You will see how it sharpens up the eyes, teeth and hair very nicely.

You can set up this filter to run in a batch with your Photoshop actions. Have it run the unsharp mask after you reduce the size of said image. Your images will look awesome.