click to visit larger image Comparison of differently prepped artwork From the Fenworks |
This was a very telling lesson for me today. Especially since I already knew it. But I had to relearn. Now, I’m going to word this like I’m talking to people who know how to use Photoshop and Illustrator, at least on a basic level, to save space:
Look at the image of the too prints above. They are a close up of my new business card. The print on the left was printed at a HIGHER resolution than the print on the right! That is, the original image file was a higher resolution. The printer itself printed both images at 2,400 dpi. Both versions of the file were well below 2400 dpi, too! But look at that difference.
That’s one photo, by the way, of two pieces of paper, one laid over the top of each other for comparison. The camera is in focus, the print on the left is in focus. It’s just that bad.
Here’s the trick. The image on the left was placed in Illustrator from the original, native Photoshop file, and resized in Illustrator to fit into the space. The image on the right was saved from Photoshop to be a round number of pixels at precisely the size it needed to be to fit into the space.
The image on the left was resized from 600ppi and 17″ across to 1280.71ppi at 3.5″ across in Illustrator, without resampling. So, the Xerox 700 was left to resample the image, and that 0.71ppi is what causes all the fuzziness!
The image on the right was resized in Photoshop to be 1200ppi at 3.5″ across from it’s original size (it is the same image, from the same native file). I had Photoshop resample the image. In fact, I used the crop tool and set it to 2″ x 3″ at 1200ppi and dragged the tool across the image to give myself the margins I wanted and doubled clicked, then saved that right to a tiff and placed in it Illustrator. Really, really simple. And the printer didn’t have to resample it, and so it comes out nice and crisp!
See?
Really, freaking neat.
How to prep your artwork for printing originally appeared on Drawing Contraption on 2014/01/21.