Printing Tips: Knowing a Few Basic Concepts in Printing

When you start out to in printing, it is possible that you may be daunted by the buzzwords and technical "mumbo jumbo" graphic artists and printers will throw at you. You may find yourself feeling alone and dumb causing you to just agree with whatever they are saying. If this has been happening to you, it is time to wizen up and know what most of them are talking about. Don't worry it is not as hard to understand as it sounds. Knowing these printing tips will help you understand what is going on in the printing process. It provides you an opportunity to give informed decisions and you won't have to rely on suspicious characters to give you dubious and opportunistic printing tips.

So without further ado, here are three basic concepts that you must deal with in printing. This will be the usual issues that you must deal with as you deliver your design to your printers.

Color modes
Now, those just starting out in printing are often confused with the color modes. They think a color is a color, red is red, and blue is blue. In the digital world, color is achieved by the combination of a few key colors. The two major modes used by most graphic design or publishing software is the RGB (Red Green Blue) mode and the CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Black) mode. RGB is perfect for web graphics while CMYK are what most printers use when they print your works.

Typically, you will be creating your designs under the RGB mode since you may source some graphics and colors from digital sources like the Internet. When these get converted to CMYK mode, there will be some subtle differences in the hue of the colors of your design. So that is why some people think that when their designs get printed, the printer itself produces a less than perfect reproduction of what you had on screen. To prevent this misunderstanding, it is better to convert your designs to CMYK yourself, so that you can judge if the colors look correct. For web images that are bright this should be mandatory. For digital photos from cameras however, the conversion won't change the image too much that it wouldn't noticeable, so high quality photos have no problems whatsoever.

Resolutions
Next, a big misunderstanding in client and printer alike is the resolution. Some customers complain that when they get their printed work, there are pixels allover the images that they send. This is a problem with the image resolution. Printers use the industry standard of 300dpi (dots per inch) while web graphics work at around only 72dpi. That is a huge difference in the number of dots. So if you use web graphics and you get it printed in a printing company, pixels will definitely show. So to be on the safe side, if you are going to use web graphics, use the ones that are relatively large so that when converted there are still a big number of "dots" to use. Also, always use high resolution photographs if you are going to print pictures.

Bleeds
Most designs should always provide a "bleed" space in its dimensions. This is a leeway of extra space that printers will cut away after printing. This protects the design from odd white spaces in the edges of the printed work as they are cut. Of course it also provides some "cutting space" as cutting machines may fall a few millimeters out of alignment in cutting every so often. Usually, the standard bleed allowance is around an added 0.25 inches in the dimensions of the printed material. So if it is a letter size like 8.5 x 11 inches. The actual canvass size that you should be working with is 8.75 x 11.25. You distribute the 0.25 inches equally in the dimensions. That is an extra 0.125 inches in the top, bottom, left and right sides of your canvass.

I hope that enlightens you somewhat in the mysteries of printing. There are actually a lot more issues that a few more printing tips an solve, but these are the major onces that hamper most printing plans these days. So know these concepts well and you'll be speaking on level with your printers and graphic artists.

The author is affiliated with a company that offers http://www.printplace.com/printproducts/printingarticles.aspx