Preparing Your Files For Online Printing

When doing business with an online printing company, you want to ensure that you get the best possible results for your prints. To guarantee this, you should always ask the printer of your choice about the options available to you. You may have your own specifications but still, getting some expert opinions could spell better quality for your printing needs.

The printer may ask you to do some preparations before uploading your file. To give you some idea, here are some online printing tips that you should remember:

- Scan the photos or images at high resolution. If you are going to take pictures, make use of large file formats. Getting images with high resolution is essential in online printing to achieve clear prints. When you upload these files in the computer, make sure to maintain their original resolution. Working on these files, such as resizing and saving them, could result in loss of data, which may affect the quality of the images. - Use lossless file formats such as TIFF to avoid or lessen the probability of data loss. Always make sure that you are aware of the file formats you save your image files in. Certain file formats might reduce the resolution of your image which may be bad as it can affect the quality of the image. For an image to print nicely, its output size needs to be at least 300 dots per inch (DPI).

- Make sure the color mode of your files is CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key, or black) If you are submitting files in other color standard, such as RGB (red, green and blue) or Pantone, the printer will convert them to CMYK. This may not be good as conversion from one standard to another could cause the colors to shift. It’s better to design in CYMK mode from the start rather than having your final file in RGB mode, only to be converted later into CMYK – doubling the effort and time for lower quality result.

- Always proofread your text files for typos, misspellings, grammar mistakes, etc. Don’t forget to embed the font, which must be at 400 dots per inch. Consider sending an accompanying .eps image file which should contain the embedded fonts. Actual font files that include the print and screen versions of the fonts used may also be sent so the printer can determine if there are any font errors before printing.

- When you have selected which professional printing company to hire for your printing project, coordinate with them to confirm the proper layout for a specific design. You must understand that most printers have a set of required file types or formats so ask them about the format in which the file must be saved so they would be able to access it.

Proper file preparation is vital to the success of any printing process. Whether you are designing posters, brochures, catalogs or other documents, preparing the files in the right format and making sure that the images and texts are at their optimal resolution will contribute to your print’s overall quality.

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