Chapters 8, 9, & 10

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 deals with explaining how to prep your designs so you can get ready to submit your work to the printers the correct way. It explains how to do it in each design program to like InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.  When you are contacting a printing company, it will probably be the salesperson you will speak to first. They will gather your information and provide you with an estimate of how much it will cost to produce your work and tell you all the steps you need to go through along the way. The steps will include like when you can expect the first set of proofs, when the press run will take place, and when it will be delivered to you. The salesman then sends your work to a CSR, which is a customer service representative. The CSR will give you information on what you will need for your job's special needs. The CSR is the main contact for jobs and is expected to know everything about a job. A key point to remember is to inform the CSR as soon as possible about if anything about your job or project needs to be changed.

You need to discuss special issues with a CSR, such as unusual stock, special mixed inks, varnishes or coatings, custom finishing, unusual content.  It is important to keep your sanity and theirs. Only contact the main CSR people, know about your project so you can give specific details about when you want your print job done so it doesn't screw up the final date its supposed to be done. Planning for print is the next step. It is important to do this building from the ground up. Make sure you established the following important specifications like external document size, adequate bleed, internal panel sizes, artwork interactions with folds, perforations, or die cut trims, correct number of pages, and correct inks.

Next step to do is check the raster images or vector artwork. "It is important that all your images are sufficient resolution at final size, and that you've saved the images in an appropriate format and in the correct color space." (McCue) Make sure you consult your print service provider so you know they get your job requirements right. Some of the guidelines are resolution should be 300 ppi, color space, which comes in one of five major flavors for printing purposes like CMYK, RGB, grayscale, monochrome, and duotone. The other guidelines are retouching, rotations and scaling, and filenames. For vector artwork, illustrator or freehand allow you to place raster images as content, and you actually encounter the same issues that you would with page-layout applications. "Make sure you check for correct colors, images, fonts, text, and bleed.  Image proofs are sometimes referred to as random proofs or scatter proofs, since they are proofs of just the images without any page-layout context." (McCue) You may want to print some of your proofs before just giving them to the print service provider just to make sure it turns out the way you want it. There are two kinds of proofs and they are image proofs and page proofs. The only different is you do one in Photoshop and the other in InDesign. They each have their checklist as well.

Chapter 9


Chapter 9 is all about Photoshop and tips how to do it.  When scaling or rotating an image you need to know the fate of the image. You need to ask yourself a few questions. At what scale factor will the image be used? Will the image be used at multiple sizes? Will the image be rotated in its final size? What are the important elements in the image? Will the image be used on the Web, as well as for print? When scaling you basically definitely want to make sure its in proportion or it will not turn out well. For rotating it looks best when you rotate at every 15 degrees or the image will have curvy lines on the side of the image. The scaling depends a lot on the size of the image when you bring it into Photoshop as well. Resolution has similar rules to the image size, because the concepts are connected. 300 ppi is the final image size that is best to use when printing. If your project is going to be printed at a higher line screen, such as 175 lpi or above then you need to increase the resolution of your image that is over 300 ppi. Color space in Photoshop deals with the image being in either RGB or CMYK. When printing you always want to convert your image either to CMYK or grayscale depending on what you want to use it for. When you convert an image to CMYK you lose some flexibility. When puttting images on a website you will need to make sure its RGB. When you use an Illustrator file you need to make sure its converted into CMYK or it won't be able to print because of the color space.

When working with a layered image it is best to save the original copy of the image so if you need to back and edit you can., but for printing you need to make sure the image is flattened, which can be done by going to under the layers panel and choose merge layers in CS4. In CS5, underneath the layer panel there is an option now you can go to by just clicking flatten image. It works the exact same. Transparency is the percentage in Photoshop that is by the opacity. This is honored not just by Photoshop, but also my InDesign and Illustrator. It basically fades the background or image in a document to create a creative project. There are right and wrong ways when creating a path in Photoshop. "Photoshop's attempts to convert an active selection ("marching ants") to a clipping path are valiant, but the results are usually less than stellar." (McCue) Magic Wand selection is not the best tool used for clipping a path. A better clipping path is made by the Pen Tool. There's no wiggles in the lines using it. Duotone's are images made up of two colors, which one color is usually black then one spot color to go with it. It adds a lot of visual interest to a job with a limited color palette.

Chapter 10


Chapter 10 is basically the same as chapter 9, only difference is this is covering Illustrator. Artboards is like an imaginary piece of paper in Illustrator and its a bit confusing to a relationship to the actual artwork. To create an new artboard you just create a new Illustrator document then its automatically created after you enter the dimensions. You can actually make a total of 100 artboards manually in one existing document. All you have to do is click and drag the artboard drag tool. When it comes to bleeds you can actually go to an existing document and go to File > Document Set Up. Bleed values are usually applied to Illustrator within the actual document.

To simply artwork you can go to Choose Object > Path > Clean Up to delete little stray points that are caused from pen clicks or objects that have no fill and stroke, and empty text paths. This also is how you clean up your document when you are done. Clean up deletes all unnecessary artwork that you don't plan to use and it simplifies your complex art as well. "Illustrator offers a number of imaginative live effects that allow you to transform a simple object into something much more interesting with just a few clicks." (McCue) Live means that you can modify how an object looks by editing effects in the Appearance panel, without altering anything. It is also possible to hide or remove an effect from a specific object. The Effects menu is divided into two parts, which are Illustrator Effects and Photoshop effects. "The Illustrator are applied to the interiors and the edges of vector objects, including objects being used as Clipping Masks for placed images." (McCue) The Photoshop effects apply to the interior of vector objects without having to do any modification to the images, even including the ones as Clipping Masks. Effects would be like shadows or glowing as examples.

Transparency is similar to the one in Photoshop because it makes an image lighter and blends the image into its background and adds more of a creative look to your project. With Illustrator, spot colors may be involved because you are converting the image to CMYK. You may have bad results if you try to create spot color objects and try to bring them into InDesign because the color may not be the same as you intended it to be. Overprint Preview is a great tool to overlap objects and it won't cause any problems because in fact it can help you figure out problems you have. You can also flatten a transparency in Illustrator like you can in Photoshop as well.

Lastly, I will explain linked and embedded images. There are pros and cons to each. When you link an image in Illustrator it actually is a smaller file than when its embedded. Its because they are easily color corrected or retouched. When you embed an image, it actually increases the file size, since the file image is added to the file. The good thing about embedding is that its easier to track all the components in a file because if its a Link, it would then send you to Photoshop for that specific image. Embedding complicates image editing. If the original image is available then you can go the Re-links underneath the Links panel menu and find that image you are searching for. Afterwards you can then update your Link so that doesn't happen again unless you don't Package the file. All the information I got this from was the book, Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications by Claudia McCue.