The Men Who Knew Too Little
In the days when hard drives cost as much as used automobiles, a man with hundreds of scanned photographs decided to conserve disk space. He converted all his JPEG images to useless dithered BMP files, figuring he could convert them back in the future.
A man with over 5000 vinyl albums from 20th century Jazz greats decided to digitize his collection. Using a USB preamp to connect a turntable, he completed the arduous task months later. Afterwards, he discovered the turntable had progressively lost calibration and that the selected bit rate was improperly set.
Both these men have something in common. They each ended up with a boatload of bad files. Starting a project without preliminary investigation can lead to heartache. For similar reasons, many either shy away from submitting files for professional printing or provide less than adequate materials and hope that the printer will fix it.
To someone who lacks the proper hardware and software, delivering unaltered materials into the hands of a professional for file preparation is a wise option. This approach may involve gathering Microsoft Word files along with JPEG images captured from a digital camera and perhaps some napkin doodles. The professional results achieved are well worth the nominal preparation fee.
Basic Tools
- Calibrated monitor
- Image editing software (Adobe Photoshop, Elements, Pixelmater, etc.)
- Page layout application (QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, or Adobe Illustrator)
Those Who Know Just Enough
For someone with moderate art skills and basic tools, preparing files need not require an understanding of all possible methods and file formats. With basic tools, one can familiarize himself with about a half dozen file types.
Primary Graphics File Formats
JPEG (Joint Photographers Expert Group) graphic file format that compresses full-color bitmap graphics to obtain smaller files by averaging and discarding pixel data. Though most digital cameras produce JPEG (JPG) images, saving them as TIFF after making edits is recommended.
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a pixel-based (bitmap) digital image file format. Unlike JPEG, TIFF retains detail through successive file opening and edits. TIFF supports black and white, grayscale, RGB and CMYK color images.
PDF (Portable Document Format) is a compact graphic file format. Viewable by Adobe Reader (free), Adobe Acrobat Professional, Adobe Illustrator and third party PDF viewers.
PSD (Photoshop Document) is a native Adobe raster graphic file format. PSD files, may be placed within Adobe applications like InDesign or Illustrator without conversion. However, TIFF retains nearly identical information and is preferred in most cases.
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) is a less compact file format generally used for resolution-independent vector art that will be resized. Corporate logos and text are common examples of vector artwork (mathematically defined shapes ). Over the years, the format has been expanded to support raster images (photographs). Adobe Illustrator is a common application for preparing EPS artwork.
CMYK refers to cyan, magenta, yellow, and black respectively. This is the traditional four-color semi-transparent ink combination used to reproduce a wide range of colors on printing presses. (Some digital printers include additional ink colors.) Before converting images to CMYK, always save a RGB copy since color gamuts vary.
RGB colors are made up of red, blue and green light respectively. In general, it offers a wider color gamut than can be reproduced with CMYK inks. It is more suitable for viewing images on a video or computer monitor. Digital cameras save images in RGB color space. Depending on the output device, pictures may be converted to CMYK before printing.
GIF, PNG and RAW are additional file formats not recommended for printed output for inherently different reasons.
Putting It All Together
Talk to someone at the print shop that will output files or look on the Web site for file preparation instructions. If templates are provided, use them. In most cases, photos and spot colors should be converted to CMYK before output. However, it is possible with some professional software to convert everything to CMYK when creating a PDF. Photographs, text and artwork are assembled within a page layout application. When a native page layout file is submitted, all fonts and placed images must accompany it. Sometimes this causes problems when fonts for one operating system are incompatible with another used for output. For this reason (and others), some print shops, like Reactive Imaging, use a PDF workflow. When high resolution PDF files are delivered for output, there is no need to provide supporting fonts or placed images.
Reactive Imaging can output camera-ready files or prepare them for customers. An online Graphic Arts Glossary is available to customers who wish to prepare their own files. Blank file templates are provided on most banner stand ordering pages.
