Supplying Artwork Guide
We request all our artwork to be supplied as high resolution (300dpi). You must correctly prepare your PDF file. These options must be set for commercial printing:
- Resolution - Choose High Resolution
- Compression Settings - For colour and greyscale this should be downsampled to 300dpi with "auto compression" set on high
- Font Embedding - Should be set to "embed all fonts"
Colour needs to be set as CMYK not RGB (RGB artwork will be converted to CMYK and this could affect your colours.
Colour gamut differences
With RGB, colours are created from Red, Green and Blue. CMYK uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black).
RGB is described as ‘additive’. With no light as a starting point, RGB adds light from the three primary colours, Red, Green and Blue to create the desired colour. When all three colours of light are combined, white is achieved. The RGB system is used by devices that create colours by combining light sources, such as TV screens, computer monitors and projectors. For this reason, it's NOT an appropriate approach to colour synthesis for print.
CMYK is described as ‘subtractive’. The background starts out as white, which reflects all the colours of the spectrum. As colours are added, the wavelengths of light that can be reflected are limited. Hence CMYK can be said to ‘subtract’ unwanted wavelengths of light in order to achieve the required colour. CMYK is used when creating colours by mixing inks or dyes, making it the preferred system of colour synthesis for print.
Why print in CMYK?
Commercial print presses achieve colours by combining inks. They tend to use cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks to produce colours on a white background. It makes sense then that CMYK files are used to prepare artwork for print.
RGB picture files are ideal for devices that reproduce coloured images via a light source such as electronic screens and projectors. However, they’re not set up to tell a printer how to reproduce those colours with inks.
That’s why all RGB files that are presented for print end up getting converted to CMYK. However, because RGB covers a broader gamut of colours than CMYK, some shades will be compromised during conversion. This is particularly true for vivid oranges and greens.
Converting RGB to CMYK
Using software like Adobe Photoshop, it’s possible to readjust the colours after converting your RGB file so that your CMYK image more closely resembles the original.
Adobe Illustrator
In Illustrator, the colour mode is set when the document is created. Again, we recommend using preset “pdf/x-1a:2001” as you export your document to PDF.
If you’ve created your project using an alternative program, key settings are often called “colour mode CMYK” or “process colours” so select these settings for a more accurate colour representation.
In summary…
Regardless of whether you submit your artwork as an RGB or CMYK file, all files will be converted to CMYK before going to print. So if you want to be sure your colours will be accurately represented on the finished article, we recommend you convert your file to CMYK and view it on a high-quality monitor prior to submission
Resolution Guide
An image that looks great on screen might not look so great in print. If the image that looked sharp on your monitor appears pixelated in print, that’s down to resolution.
This guide will help you to understand the resolution requirements for print, and show you how to prepare your artwork so it looks just as good in your hand as it did on your computer.
Resolution is a description of image quality. A high-resolution image will appear sharp and precise, while a low-resolution image will be blurred or pixelated.
The standard units for measuring resolution are pixels per inch (ppi) on screen and dots per inch (dpi) in print, indicating the number of dots or pixels along an inch-long line. The more image data there is to play with, the finer the picture quality.
What resolution is required?
The industry standard requirement for digital artwork files is a minimum resolution of 300ppi, or pixels per inch. That way, the file will contain enough image data to allow a printer to print at 300dpi, or dots per inch.
That figure comes from the world of publishing, where we’re used to considering an image that’s printed onto something you can hold in your hands and observe at arm’s length. At this resolution, the eye will read the image as a nice, smooth, continuous picture, and not a blocky collage of colours.
How to create high-resolution documents
If you’re using design software to create or edit your artwork, it’s important to set the resolution for your project from the outset. In most programs, when you create a new image, a dialogue box will ask you how large you want your canvas and, crucially, X resolution and Y resolution.
X resolution dictates pixel density horizontally across the image and Y resolution does the same vertically. Lock these fields together or ensure the two values are identical to ensure consistent resolution horizontally and vertically.
There’ll usually be the option to pick what units of pixel density you’d like to use for resolution. For our purposes choose ‘pixels/in’ (this may appear as ‘PPI’ or ‘DPI’). For the vast majority of commercial print work, 300 will be an appropriate value to go for, because a 300ppi digital image will directly translate to 300dpi print resolution.
If you aren’t creating your artwork from scratch, you may want to check the resolution of any source images you wish to use.
How to check resolution
File size can be a fair indicator of the quality of an image, but it’s not conclusive. When preparing digital artwork to send to print, a revealing way to check it on screen is to zoom in on the image at three or four times the size of the final print. Viewing a PDF at 300% or 400%, for example, will give you an impression of how it might appear once printed.
This is because screens tend to display images at 72ppi whereas a print document will tend to be rendered at 300dpi. So by expanding your artwork to three or four times its real-life dimensions, you’ll be able to see if the image might appear pixelated in print.
What file types do you accept?
We accept, PNG or any PDF compatible files.
We regret we are not able to print from Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher, or Works files.
The entire copyright throughout the world in all printing plates, litho positives and negatives, artwork, designs, photographic transparencies, negatives or positives and any other artistic craftsmanship made by or for Inkstant Grafx pursuant to or in implementation of any contract with the customer shall belong to Inkstant Grafx. Inkstant Grafx agrees that unless the customer becomes in default of any obligation to make any payment to Inkstant Grafx, it will not reproduce any such items for any competitor in business of the customer.
Inkstant Grafx will not reproduce any copyright materials, Logos, branding, lyrics etc without adequate proof of the correct licenses to reproduce.