Printing advice — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

Printing advice

This page's ID: 28288

Edit Post

Who can edit a post?	The poster and administrators may edit a post. The poster can only edit it for a short while after the initial post.

Your User Name:
Your Password:
Login Options:	Remember Me On This Computer

Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	To post to a really old file again...who knows someone may revisit and find they answer they need. I have had a fair bit of experience here though by no means an expert. First off Vector is not required but if possible will always make things better. Vector vs Raster really depends on what it is you are designing. Text, Logos, non photographic design elements in most cases you want to keep vector as much as possible. The rub is if you use vector objects and try to apply a vector effect such as drop shadow or glow or anything that causes the use of transparency effects will not usually print correctly to and oversize printer. They cause strange boxes to appear around the containing object that the effect is assigned to. Sometimes they are just slightly discolored form the surrounding areas or simply all white or black. What do most printers do to fix this. They take it into Photoshop and flatten the who thing anyway so by by vector images. That's not necessarily an really bad thing. If it was designed to size and was done at a high enough resolution when flattened you probably won't notice too much difference. Sometimes the best thing if you need those effects or are using photographic elements is to work in Photoshop and cut vector objects from illustrator and paste them in Photoshop as vector smart objects then apply those effects in Photoshop. As for size vs resolution. I am blessed at my work with a Mac 3.2 8 core system with 8 GB of ram(soon to be 16)and a 30 inch Apple display so I have done most of my large format stuff that was not all vector at full size and 300 DPI resolution. We print here on an Epson Stylus Pro 9600 which prints on up to 44" rolls of paper. On nice photo paper these look great however recently I have done some Very Large format trade show stuff that was 117 x 90 inches. This is far too large for us to print here and it prints directly onto a special material that we do not have the equipment for. So in working with the company that did print it I was given very specific instructions on submitting files. They deal only in large format most of it very large and I was told this if designing in photoshop. I can make it Half size at 300 DPI or Full size at 150 DPI I went with the Full size option at 150 DPI and it looked great. Since then I have done a few other following that same advice and all been looked fine. We some places we outsource too that won't even take a 300 DPI large format file because it crashed their RIP. Vector is still great and if your design doesn't require anything but vector the resolution is not really a issue. You can design full size, half size, quarter size whatever it will scale perfectly but if you designing primarily in illustrator and need to mix in some Raster photo objects I recommend designing at full size but prepare your images to place in the file to be roughly the size you want them at 150 DPI. This doesn't mean you can start with lower res images since you working in large format and most of the images provided to you by a customer are not going to be large high res images or even if using stock photos you still want to start with the highest resolution image you can get your hands on then open a new photo shop file that is the size you want it at 150DPI(for large format only) the open your provided art and drag the layer from one Photoshop file to the other. If your original was 300 dpi and you drag it into the 150 dpi file it will come in much larger to begin with and even more so if your original is 600 DPI. Then once you have it in the new file scale and crop as needed and save the new image as .jpg. yes I know .tif is king in print raster images and I agree but in large format you are trying to minimize file size as much as possible and .jpg is much more manageable and the trade in quality in this case I think is very small. However if your image is a composite that uses several layers you can either save a .jpg copy or especially if you think changes to the composite are a good possibility just pull in the .PSD In this case the file may be bigger but you may save some time in changes by being able to tweak the PSD and have the change update to your working file. You can however always make the change in the PSD and save another copy of the .jpg to update with. You just have to decide if you'd rather have the extra step or the smaller file. Loading...
Options:	Enable Slimies Enable Linkwords

« Backwards — Onwards »

Show Forum Drop Down Menu