Adobe Photoshop Prepress Guide

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Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.

Adobe Photoshop Prepress Guide

Introduction
Ensuring top-notch finished results is simple in Adobe Photoshop when your document is setup correctly from the start. This document will guide you through the steps of creation, working with images, and final preparation for the press. Save time and avoid headaches: Take time to carefully follow these instructions when setting up your document. Most printing issues stem from incorrect document setup.

1. Pre-setup Questions
The following three questions help you quickly determine what special considerations need to be accounted for when creating your document. Will the document contain images or graphics (both color and monochrome/black & white)? >> Refer to: Images & Color Will images or other content go to the edge of a page? >> Refer to: Bleed Will the document be folded or bound? >> Refer to: Margins If the answer is yes to any of the above questions, take additional time to review those sections carefully before creating your document.

2. Document Setup
Create a new document (File > New) and insert your document settings. Some options can be modified later while others can only be set at the time of document setup. The following list describes the parameters to take into consideration with each option.

Size:

Indicate the finished (after cutting) size of your document. Several common paper sizes are Letter (8.5 x 11), Letter - Half (5.5 x 8.5), Tabloid (11 x 17), and A4 (210 mm x 297 mm).

PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com

Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.

Adobe Photoshop Prepress Guide

Important: Note that Photoshop has no capability to handle bleeds. You must create your document with the bleeds integrated by adding 0.25 (1/4 inch) to the height and to the width of the overall document size.

Units: It is easiest to work in inches for US Letter and similar document sizes and millimeters for metric page sizes (A4, A5, etc.) Resolution: All print documents should have a minimum resolution of around 300 pixels per inch (ppi) for acceptable

results. Higher resolution documents can pose problems in terms of computing power for minimal, if not completely imperceptible gains in quality.

Color Mode: The document must be setup as a CMYK document. Note that Photoshop Elements does not have any CMYK capabilities and is not compatible with creating images for print. Background: Your document will most likely be printed on white paper; use a white background to closely simulate
the finished product.

AdvancedColor Profile:

Select US Web Coated (SWOP) v2 for optimal color matching results from the press.

3. Bleeds in Photoshop
Bleeds are a often misunderstood concept, but very important in the printing process. Bleed means printing excess color on the edges that will intentionally be cut off. Without bleeds, small, inconsistent white borders appear between the edge of your document which looks unprofessional. Bleeds are always excessthey do not diminish your finished document size. Simply put, if any printed element goes to the edge of your page, a bleed must be included. Photoshop does not automatically handle bleeds; this must be done manually as described in section 4.

PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com

Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.

Adobe Photoshop Prepress Guide

Check your skills: Which of the three documents below must include a bleed? Note: the black lines indicate edges and are not printed.

Transport for London

Annual Report and Statement of Accounts 2008/09

MAYOR OF LONDON

Transport for London

No bleed needed! All of the printed elements are contained within the margins and stay clear of the edges.

BLEED REQUIRED! Even though 95% of the image is contained in the margins, the black bar with Annual

BLEED REQUIRED! The dark and light gray goes to the edge. This document needs a bleed.

Report goes to the edge.

Remember, bleeds are excess printed material, meaning that the document must be bigger than its finished size. You will need to incorporate a bleed of 0.125" (1/8") on all sides of your document. In Photoshop, this must be accounted for manually. Your bleed is indicated by the blue guide lines that you will createensure that your content goes past these lines. Not OK
The black stripe goes to the margin but has no bleed. To fix, drag the elements to the border.

Good to Go!
Everything is properly placed! The photo ends in the margins and the black line goes to the edge for a perfect bleed.

Uh-Oh
The objects go past the page borders and the images are outside the margins. Verify the placement of your objects on all edges of the page!

PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com

Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.

Adobe Photoshop Prepress Guide

4. Using document guides
Photoshop has no guide lines to indicate margins and bleeds. Avoid your artwork getting cut off by creating guides. Note that these guides will not be printed. To create a guide, go to View > New Guide. Type in the values for horizontal and vertical guides. Top margin: Horizontal .375 (3/8 inch) Example: .375 Bottom margin: Enter Horizontal Guide Document size minus .375 (3/8 inch) Example: 8.75-.375

Margins:

Left margin: Vertical Guide .375 (3/8 inch) Example: .375 Right margin: Enter Vertical Guide Document size minus .375 (3/8 inch) Example: 11.25-.375 Left bleed: Vertical Guide .125 (1/8 inch) Example: .375 Right bleed: Enter Vertical Guide Document size minus .125 (1/8 inch) Example: 11.25-.125

Top bleed: Horizontal .125 (1/8 inch) Example: .125 Bottom bleed: Enter Horizontal Guide Document size minus .125 (1/8 inch) Example: 8.75-.125

Bleed:

5. Preparing your document for press

Youll need to verify several aspects of your document before exporting a document ready to go to press. Photoshop does not have automated tools like InDesign to prepare documents for the press. You will have to perform all of your verifications manually!

Images:

Photoshop does not manage links and does not warn you if individual elements exceed their original resolution. When you place any image in Photoshop, it is resized to be at the necessary 300 ppi if the document is setup at 300 ppi. While it is perfectly acceptable to further shrink these images (which increases resolution), making them bigger will produce low quality results. PrintNinja is not responsible for any resolution issues. PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com
Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.

Adobe Photoshop Prepress Guide

Practical example: Most Facebook photos are sized at roughly 600 x 480 px. At press-quality resolution, this type of photo could be printed at a maximum size of 2 x 1.6. If images are not high enough quality, you will either have to: shrink them replace them with alternative images with a higher resolution find the high quality original files Finally, while you can take low resolution images into Photoshop and increase the resolution, the final result is typically poorer than the original low quality file. You can not transform a low resolution image into a high resolution image. Simply put: garbage in, garbage out.

Scale:

Stretching or squashing your images looks unprofessional. Ensure that each link has a properly proportional. Click on layers to review their proportions. This image has clearly been squashedthe height and width fields should have equal values.

Colorspace and CMYK:

All images and objects must be in the CMYK color mode to ensure proper output. The printer will not be responsible for any inaccurate colors on final products due to color shift from RGB or other color space assets. Why do my colors change?: Remember in school when you mixed primary colors to make secondary colors? Red and blue made purple; yellow and blue made green, etc. You wouldnt try to mix yellow and blue and expect it to make orange. Printing works in the same general waymixing 4 colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (thus the abbreviation: CMYK) to produce a very wide range of colors. RGB is another way of mixing colors on screens, using Red, Green, and Blue. Since the primary colors of each process are very, its impossible to duplicate exact colors, especially when working with more vibrant tones.

Fonts:

All fonts must be embedded or outlined in your exported file. Photoshop automatically transforms missing fonts to the program default and warns you of any missing type when you open your document and by a small yellow warning triangle over a text layer in the layers panel. Whenever possible, avoid flattening or rasterizing layers with text on them. Doing so often causes a small amount of noise to appear around your text. Instead, leave them as text or vector layers and save directly from Photoshop as a Photoshop PDF without flattening.

PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com

Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.

Adobe Photoshop Prepress Guide

Margins and bleed:
Double check your margins and bleed to ensure that important text and images will not get cut off or made unreadable by folding or binding. Ensure that all objects that go to the edge of the paper extend up to the bleed guides.

Exporting as an Image

We do not recommend exporting files from Photoshop as JPEG files. This causes the file to become rasterized, which can cause a small amount of noise to appear around text. We always recommend exporting non flattened PDFs from Photoshop and submitting those to us. Although saving as TIF files can prevent some of this, we still recommend PDF files instead of TIFs.

6. Exporting to press
Congratulations, youve successfully made your document and prepared it for press. Its now time to export. The Adobe PDF standard is the best format for exporting to press. There are many variants or flavors of PDFits important to choose the right one to go to the press. In the menus, choose File > Save As. Select where you will save your file and its name. Choose Photoshop PDF be sure to check the box Embed Color Profile if it isnt checked already. We strongly recommend leaving the Preserve Photoshop editing capabilities box checked. In general, leaving this setting on makes it easier for us to modify your files should they need any changes to be press ready. Choose the preset Press Quality. Click Save. Open your PDF and verify your results. The actual document dimensions should be larger than the actual finished size if it contains a bleed. For example, a US Letter (8.5 x 11) file with a 0.125 (1/8) bleed all the way around should measure 8.75 x 11.25. The excess area will be trimmed away after the press run to produce a US Letter size document.

7. Questions and problems

Running into complications? Our designers are available for pre-press consulting services to guide you through the process or to work with you to completion. Visit our website for rates and details.

PrintNinja | 877-396-4652 | www.printninja.com

Copyright 2013 PrintNinja LLC. All rights reserved. PrintNinja is a registered trademark of PrintNinja LLC. The PrintNinja logo and related marks are marks of PrintNinja LLC. This guide is provided as a conveience to PrintNinja customers and while every effort has been made to ensure its accuracy, PrintNinja cannot be responsible for any errors or omissions. This guide may contain references and examples that feature products,services or brands that are the intellectual property of others. These are included for illustrative purposes only and those products, services and brands do not endorse this guide or have any association with PrintNinja LLC.