In this entry, I will disclose the information I've learned from Chapters 8, 9 and 10 of Claudia McCue's Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications.
Chapter 8 is primarily concerned with teaching you how to prep your designs in the various design programs like InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. In terms of working for a printing company, most companies will direct you to a salesperson. They will assist you with the information you need such as estimates of production cost and a breakdown of the steps one takes necessary to print your product. Some steps included are talking with a CSR, or Customer Service Rep. Their role is to help you as the creator with any special needs for the project that you need such as special varnishes or coatings, unsual content and any kind of mixed inks crucial to the final product. The CSR acts as the primary contact for the job and is supposed to be well-versed in all aspects of the project so it's best to give them the information specs for the project as early as possibler in order for them to have your product ready by your due date.The next step is talking with the printer and making your plans for print. Make sure when you are ready to print, you communicate properly with your printer the various details of your printed project. When consulting with a printer make sure that you have already collected all the information for the product to print that you need such as artwork size, interactions with folds, any specific trims or perforations, and correct number of pages and inks. the next thing to do according to McCue is to check out your raster images/vector artwork. It's important to save the image in the right format and color space so that the resolution of the finalized image will not become compromised or pixilated. Often these images have basic requirements such as a resolution of 300ppi, any retouchings, rescalings, rotations, file name editing and one of the five major color spaces: CMYK, RGB, monochrome, duotone and grayscale. Chapter 8 also taught me that by making sure these specifications are correctly filled out, your image should be crisp when printed. Just to be safe, it also says that pre-printing a few proofs of your image will benefit you in order to make sure the image is the way you want it. There are two kinds of proofs: image and page. Image proofs are proofs of just the image itself, with no page layout attached to them. They are also called scatter or random proofs and can be done in photoshop whereas page proofs are done in InDesign.
Chapter 9 talks primarily about Photoshop and how to use it for graphic design and printing. In terms of scaling and rotating the image, certain things to take note of when going about this is whether or not the image will be printed in multiple sizes, if the image will be rotated in final size, if the image will be coupled as both an image for print and an image for Web purposes, among other factors. To rotate the image, the easiest rotation is at a 15 degree angle in order to prevent any wavy lines along the sides of the image. To scale, proportion is key in image's visceral appearance. When scaling the image, the size of it previous to being brought into Photoshop may be adjusted to 300ppi in order to to get the most beneficial to printing. Since a printed image only operates in CMYK or grayscale, you'll want to convert the image to one of these two even though RGB is also accepted in Photoshop. When posting the image to the Web however, it is important to make the image RGB ONLY. These tips are to ensure that the image's resolution will respond well to whatever medium it is being posted or printed to. With color space, it is important that if you use an Illustrator file, it must be converted to CMYK or else printing the image will be impossible. When it comes to flattening or layering an image, keep an original copy of the image so you can go back and re-edit if necessary. For printing, make sure the image has been flattened using the merge layers option in the layers panel in CS4 but not CS5. To use in CS5, you can choose to flatten the image simply by clicking flatten image in the layer panel. Either way the image is flattened. Transparency is also covered in this chapter which is the opacity percentage in Photoshop. Essentially it used to decrease the fade of the background or foreground of the image. When it comes to creating a path in Photoshop, it can be created using either the Wand or Pen tools. The Pen tool works better as the clipping is much more concise. Duotone images (previously worked with in the Direct Mail Project) are images consisting of only two colors: normally either black or white and one spot color. It gains the viewer's optical attention and gives interest in the minimalist quality of the image.
Chapter 10 covers the various uses of Illustrator. To kick off this section, I shall start by talking about Arboards and their uses. Artboards are used like an extra layer to place the image, even though this layer does not actually exist, but is used more of a practiced guide (fun fact: you can make up to 100 artboards, using the artboard drag tool). With Bleeds in Illustrator, you can adjust the settings by going to File and selecting Document set up, even if the bleeds for the document already existed. These settings are used in Illustrator within the document itself. To simplify complex art within Illustrator, try going to choose object, click on Path then select Clean up to get rid of any excess pen clicks or miscellaneous text paths or objects without fills or strokes. In the Effects menu, there are two main types which are Illustrator and Photoshop, respectively. In the former, effects are applied to the insides and edges of the vector, even the Clipping Masks. Photoshop Effects mainly work with the inside of the image and you don't have to modify the image, Clipping Mask or otherwise. Types of Effects included are shadows, glows or distorts.
Transparencies in Illustrator is much like Photoshop in that it can lessen the image's concrete appearance and can be blended. According to McCue using spot colors are OK in that the image will be converted to CMYK anyway. The results may vary if you transfer the image from Illustrator to InDesign though because the spot colors may be different depending on the color chosen. You can also flatten the transparency of the image, making it easier to transfer or print the image. Finally, I will touch upon Illustrator's Linked and Embedded images. A linked image is smaller than an embedded image because of color corrections or retouchings done to the file. The benefit to Embedding a file is that it keeps all the image components together, rather than Linked files that require you sometimes to backtrack into Photoshop to clarify the existing file specifications. Unfortunately, Embedding also complicates any edits made to the image whereas linking the image can be easily edited by Re-Linking everything.
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