Creative Conversation
We all use food that comes in a box sometimes. Rice a Roni, Mac and Cheese, Cous - Cous, etc. This food is not very healthy, but it tastes good! And, better yet, the kids actually eat it. To make it a little more nutritious, I like to add stuff. Sliced or slivered almonds, pine nuts, frozen peas and carrots or frozen corn. Fresh or frozen broccoli goes great in rice or mac and cheese.
Now that I spent all that hard work on my last post about DPI, I realize that I’ve just been around too long and PPI is way more relevant. So, for simplicity sake, please substitute PPI in the previous post with DPI when discussion preparing a file on Photohop. Photoshop’s dialog box uses pixels/inch, meaning pixels per inch. For more details on the differences, you can do a Google search, and start here.
Digital Prepress and inkjet printing are apples and oranges. The processes are completely different. A digital prepress is like a giant laser printer. The toner is a fine powder that is baked onto the paper. Ink jets use liquid ink that spreads when applied to paper because it’s liquid and thats what liquid does. As a result, ink jets print photo quality images with continuos tones as the ink spreads and overlaps. Files don’t need to be as large or contain as much information for a great ink jet print as they do for a great pre-press print. There is no visible quality increase over 150 dpi on an ink jet and in fact printing at higher quality may simply use more ink and cost more money.
For digital pre-press, on the other hand, which is how Photo Book Memories and other photo book companies print, size and dpi matter. Most photo book companies print at 150dpi. They take your files and compress them allowing for faster uploads, less server and storage space and much smaller file sizes. Image quality suffers as a result. Photo Book Memories prints at 300dpi.
For best quality prints, your files should be 300dpi. At 12″ x 12″, this is 3600 x 3600 pixels. They need to be created at this size. Unless you are working with vector graphics (like Illustrator creates), enlarging files can result in huge quality loss. When designing in Photoshop, you are using raster graphics.
The larger the file and higher the dpi, the more information the image contains. The more information, the better print. There is no need to go higher than 300dpi. Graphics start to suffer quality loss immediately. Sharp edges disappear giving way to visible anti-aliased edges. The lower the dpi, the worse it gets. 200dpi is acceptable, 150dpi is the bottom of the acceptable range. Anything lower is unacceptable.
Photos seem to hold up a little better. Perhaps because we are wired to see things like faces and our brains blend everything together making it look OK.
If you create your layouts at 150dpi, simply enlarging them will actually lower the quality even further than simply printing them. The software simply guesses and invents information. If you are doubling the size, you’re doubling the information. It didn’t exist before you enlarged the image. This is called interpolation. In the example below, compare the enlarged, 300dpi image to the original 300dpi image above. There are ways to enlarge images for layouts so the loss of quality isn’t as visible, but that’s another discussion.
It’s summer time, like the tiki look?
Using a flash can create harsh lighting and glare. Using curves and levels can help, but sometimes it’s just not enough. When printing photos like these, the white becomes even more distracting, leaving an area where there is no ink.
The rubber stamp or clone tool and the healing brush are my preferred tools of choice.
Choose a soft brush and lower the opacity to somewhere between 20% - 80%. It really depends on how much your fixing. I start with about 20%. If it’s not enough I bump it up. Set your mode to darken. You want to clone from the middle tones of your image. So, for this example, I clicked on the pink part of the cheeks, next to the white I wanted to fix. Stay away from the shadows. The sides of the cheeks are in shadow and are much too desaturated and dark, containing too much gray to be useful. Just “tap” the clone tool over the area covering a small area at once. Don’t paint. Adjust your brush size using [ ] as needed.
Use the healing brush, spot healing will usually do. Set it to normal and go over any areas that still need a little help with small strokes. This will help blend any color problems that might have occurred with the clone tool. It will also get rid of any imperfections, smoothing out the skin.
When desiging 12 x 12 scrapbook pages to be printed, you must create a very large file. The standard is 3600 x 3600 pixels. That’s a lot of pixels. Viewing your designs on your computer monitor can be a challenge. To see the “big picture” you need to view your page at a reduced size. This obscures the details.In Photoshop, you should view your pages at 50% and 25%. You want even increments. The pixels will reflect more of what your images really look like. To zoom in, work at 200%, 300%, etc. Views at 66%, 33%, etc., are not very accurate.
With so many pixels, a minor flaw is easily over looked. There could be a single pixel line somewhere, or your elements are actually a pixel or 3 off from lining up where you want them. Always zoom in to inspect. Tiny flaws that are easily missed on your monitor seem magnified when printed (only because they were missed digitally).
If something looks bad on screen, it’s going to look bad printed. The exception is jpg artifacts. They actually don’t look quite as bad printed as they do onscreen.
Some examples of surprises in print include:
Blurry Photos - when viewed smaller than actual size on screen, they look OK, be sure to view at 100%.
Grainy Photos - when viewed smaller than actual size on screen, they look OK. The grain isn’t as obvious on screen as in print.
Blown Out Highlights (no ink, so very white). Very distracting in print. See tutorial for fixing.
Here’s a sticker from a Luau kit I’m designing. Personal use only, hope you like it!
Click to open full size image in new window.
Full Bleed: Term used when an image extends completely to all four edges of the finished sheet. Printing the image beyond the trim edge of a sheet to ensure that there is no white space at the edge after the printed paper is trimmed to finish size.
When designing your scrapbook pages, keep in mind that 1/8″ will be trimmed from the edges. Don’t place anything important right on the edge, like text. You can’t leave blank space, it will leave white edges. I need to trim part of the printed page. I highly recommend you use guides if designing in Photoshop. For other software programs that may not have guides, make a layer that sits on top of all the others with lines representing the trim lines. Make sure your background goes all the way to edges of your document and that your important pieces stay inside the lines or guides.
If your pages will be hard bound into a book, I will leave 1/4″ white space for the binding so you’re binding edge will not loose anything. Design 2 page spreads to match up at the edges and they will match up in your book. No other book companies do this. They all suck your designs into the binding. Just an FYI if you’re reading this with the intent to print and bind elsewhere.
If you are desiging 2 page spreads that will be prints and not bound, you want to design them to overlap slightly, 1/8″. This is important for things like a family tree or if you have a photo that spans 2 pages. It’s not important at all if the spread is simply a continuation of the background design. You need to consider what you’ll be doing with the prints, as well.
Your final page size will be 11.75″ x 11.75″. If you want your final page size to be 12″ x 12″, simply make your files 12.25″ x 12.25″. If you are using backgrounds from kits and such, simply enlarge them to fill the extra space. Enlarging them this small amount will not effect the quality. You can also enlarge pages you have already designed, or we can do it for you.
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Cover images can also be full bleed. The same concept applies. There needs to be extra room for trimming. I trim the cover images by hand. I can do 1/8″, but an extra 1/4″ would be much more helpful. Setting guides in your document will allow me to see where you want your image trimmed.
Things to avoid:
Placing a border around your pages. The trimmed edges are never exact and your border will be thicker on some edges and could possibly get cut off completely on others.
Placing text, journaling, headers, etc., on the edge. They will get cut off.
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