What's new
By:
Photoshop Gurus Forum

Welcome to Photoshop Gurus forum. Register a free account today to become a member! It's completely free. Once signed in, you'll enjoy an ad-free experience and be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Ad for newpaper printing


X

x900mhz

Active Member
Messages
35
Likes
0
Hello everyone,

I created an full color cmyk ad in photoshop including 2 pics. Before flattening the pic, I rasterized the type. The file was saved as a 200 resolution .EPS file according to the editors specs.

The ad was then inserted into Indesign and PDF's created for print.

Problem is the ad's print quality is poor. It looks like a very low resolution ad both in text & photo.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for any and your help.

Tod
 
first, why on earth did they want the text rasterized. That goes against every principle of quality printing.
 
Hey ronmatt - thanks for the comment. Could have used your expetise/advice at the same time.

I was just following information sent to me. Usually in Corel, I change text to curves for printing. Would you "convert to shape"?

Thanks,

Tod
 
Sorry, I don't work in Corel. I'm all Adobe. Actually you can produce Photoshop work and save as .eps. Just place your text in it's own layer and save as .eps. In the save dialog be sure to check 'on' to save vector data. Then distill to pdf. Your text will be saved as vector ( PS 7 and later ) For print, create your piece at print size and no less than 250 ppi. the printed piece should look fine.
 
If you have InDesign... why aren't you using that to do your typesetting since that's what it's designed for. Type should always stay in vector format as long as possible. This means fonts if possible, or outline the fonts to create vector shapes if need be... or if you really really know what you're doing... you can create non anti-aliased (that's right, no anti-aliasing), rasterized versions at the exact LPI of the final output.

I'm thinking your printshop has some issues.
 
Thanks mindbender, appreciate your comments muchly, but I could really use some advice & suggestions based on the information given to me as follows:

I created an full color cmyk ad in photoshop including 2 pics. Before flattening the pic, I rasterized the type. The file was saved as a 200 resolution .EPS file according to the editors specs.

The ad was then inserted into Indesign and PDF's created for print.

Problem is the ad's print quality is poor. It looks like a very low resolution ad both in text & photo.

The editor just places the ads into indesign to pagenate the paper. I only use PageMaker 7 as I created majority of my work in photoshop or corel for digital output.

If anyone has any suggestions on how I may be able to correct this problem, I would greatly appreciate it as I kinda know already what I have done wrong. :)

Thank you for all your input as always.
 
A page layout program is vector. Not bitmap. It is resolution free, save for the bitmaps imported or placed into it.
So the questions I'd have in this case would be, What was the resolution of the 'original' image? Did you change the resolution in PS properly? And why rasterize the type. Was it because your printer wanted to assure that the type was embedded? If this is the case, outlining the text or saving as an .eps and distilling would have assured this. Supplying an embedded PDF from distiller is the most common form of print document today. If, for some reason, the printer can't handle a PDF. Start shopping for a new printer, these people are stuck in the stone age...As for your workflow, consider getting In Design or Quark. Pagemaker just ain't up to speed.
 
but I could really use some advice & suggestions based on the information given to me as follows
Click to expand...

Well... since you said that what you did wasn't turning out right... then the advice is don't do it that way again.

I'm not sure what you're trying to "fix" since this has already gone to press it sounds. Once you have a flat rasterized version of a file... you can't fix blurriness problems without starting over and doing it right... which is what my advice related to. Basically I laid out the three options you have for type no matter what application you use. As for the blurriness of the photo... it sounds like they didn't print it right. You could try printing your own seps and color ref to send them and see if that works better... if they can handle seps. I think the real problem lies with the printshop... and when that is the case... there isn't much you can do but try to find another shop or work within whatever weird guidelines they have. When I was dealing with a horrible newspaper I had to run ads in (no choice of printers), the only way I got my artwork printed even legibly was to print my own seps and color ref. They were taking my nice vector files and rasterizing them in an ollllld copy of photoshop then printing them and making plates from that. Stuff came out horribly. At least if you hand them seps you have some control... but that's only if they are able to deal with seps and mainly if the problem lies in how they handle digital files.

For a photo to come out blurry... it was either too low resolution to begin with or they messed up the digital file when they went to print it. As ronmatt said... what is the resolution of the original photo?

ronmatt said:
consider getting In Design or Quark. Pagemaker just ain't up to speed.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, because Quark is an unbearable joy to work with. :P ;)
 
Thanks guys for all your replies. I guess what I should have just stated a little clearer "I need your expertise" as I already know that the print quality for the ad is poor and did not turn out as expected. I have stated what was done in this situation - which did not produce a good print - so I am simply trying to correct it as best as I can.

I have the original psd file as I created it. It is at 300 resolution, CMYK. I would have prefered to just send it as a .PDF file BUT I was asked to send it as an .EPS file at 200 resolution.

Seeing as the ad will run for several issues, I can go back to the orginal .PSD file, convert the text layers to shapes and save as an .EPS file. Or I can flatten the image before saving it as an .EPS file. What would you do in this situation?

Seeing as I am only creating the one ad for the newspaper on contract, I have no say nor am I comfortable in telling them to get another printer.

I do agree that the .PDF file is the way to go but when I suggested that, I was asked for the .EPS file instead. Is there a better way of making a good .EPS from the original layered .PSD file?

Thank you once again for your valuable advice.

Tod
 
Seems to me that you've been given multiple answers to your question by multiple people. I don't see where you're having issues still with what you've been told. You don't have to take the advice, but saying that we're not answering you or giving our 'expertise' isn't true. You also haven't responded where clarification was requested, so it makes it hard to help you.

So... what part of what we explained are you still not understanding so that we might clarify for you?
 
OK, 200 ppi would normally be fine for newsprint because the frequency they use will probably be 100 line
flattening the image and saving as an .eps, to me, is counterproductive. If you flatten the image, that will rasterize the text,
which to me is unexceptable. But in your case, required. So it seems to me that the only real issue here is; why does the ad look bad? If it's low rez, then either you did something wrong, or it's possible the printers pre-flight software screwed it up.
There's the possibility that the ad was reduced or enlarged by the printer as well (???). If the frequency used was 120 line
then 200ppi simply isn't good enough. If you'd like, e-mail me the psd and I'll make the .eps and pre-flight it and go over the report for errors.
If you do send it to me, don't do anything to it. I want the layers.

Mindbender.. I don't find any joy in Quark either...But anything's better than pagefaker. :D
 
I guess they want an eps file since they probably receive other ads for the paper. And then they can easily place the eps's in InDesign or Quark. If they use quark, I can understand that they don't want a pdf since quark and pdf work poorly together. But why do you have the text layers in Photoshop? why not make the text in Illustrator or InDesign and then create an eps?

//Anders
 
But why do you have the text layers in Photoshop? why not make the text in Illustrator or InDesign and then create an eps?
Click to expand...

If they're sending a flattened rasterized version... what difference does it make? ;)

since quark and pdf work poorly together
Click to expand...

I can't think of anything Quark does play nicely with... including the designer. hehe

ronmatt said:
If you flatten the image, that will rasterize the text,
which to me is unexceptable. But in your case, required.
Click to expand...

The two big tricks with this, as I alluded to earlier, is that you 1. need to know the exact LPI of the output device because you are going to have to match that resolution in your document to get clean edges and 2. turn off anti-aliasing on your text so that you don't get any edge artifacts when the file is printed at screen freq. This is tricky to get to work right and is a last resort... maybe you can find out what software they use or how they are going to press to see if there is another option rather than sending flattened files. It seems like in this century... sending flattened raster graphics of typesetting to a large printing operation is kinda stone age. *shrug*
 
So to summarize - hopefully correctly - I seem to get this:

1. created ad in photoshop 200 resoultion
2. keep layers
3. do not use anti aliasing for text layers
4. no need to rasterize text
5. no need to convert text layers to shapes
6. save unflattened ad as an .EPS file

Strongly suggested:
1. use .PDF file created from PageMaker, Indesign or Quark
2. or use photoshop .PDF file

Thanks ronmatt & mindbender for your suggestions, guidance and expertise.
 
No..No..No...DON'T use the PDF's from the apps. Save as .eps and distill to pdf using
using 'high quality printing' or 'press quality' or the printers profile if they provided one.
Quark pdf's are ok but PS and ID pdf's have some embedding issues.
 
ronmatt said:
Quark pdf's are ok but PS and ID pdf's have some embedding issues.
Click to expand...

To what do you refer? My experience has always been that Quark has major preflight and embedding problems... one of the things (the many things) I hate about it. While I probably wouldn't use PS (don't know how well the new CS2 and CS3 PDF engine works actually, never used it heh) I've never had problems with InDesign messing up a file. Not saying it's not entirely possible... but it sounded like you had some specifics in mind.

Font embedding has always been a stickler... I used to get around that with the newspaper I had to send my ads to by just outlining all my fonts and saving that as a copy before I gave it to them. At least that way I didn't end up with some monospace font like Courier where my nice curvy seriffed proportional font should have been because some moron substituted fonts without asking me.
 
OK, I admit, I haven't used Quark since 4.1 although I have 7 on my Mac, I only have it because some of my old accounts wanted qxd files. I eventually converted them to In Design. Quark used to use Jaws as it's default pdf engine so there were issues. I personally don't like Quark. In Design and Photoshop and Illustrator uses Adobe library pdf's. There are embedding problems with this if you're not carefull. Pitstop rejects many Adobe library pdf's. My workflow is set up so that all .eps files exported from PS, Ill and In Design go to a watched folder and are automatically distilled to distiller pdf's. using my own profiles.
I have no problems with this set up. I do have occational problems with other pdf engines. I also pre-flight all my docs with Pitstop 7.1 before submitting anything, to assure accuracy. I don't have time for any glitches. Occasionally I'm asked to impose a job. I use Preps 5.03 for this task. Preps dislikes In Design pdf's even worse that Pitstop. Preps converts the pdf to postscript and will simply not deal with undistilled files. This means I must extract the bad pdf out of the doc, convert it to eps and distill it then place it back. All in all, people who don't handle the amount of pages that I do, have the time to deal with errors and bad files. I simply push through too much volume to have to be concerned with these issues. Maybe 98% of In Design pdf's will pass pre-flight. I don't want to deal with the 2% that don't.
Other than that, they're fine :righton:
 
Mmm. I don't deal with the output volume that you seem to so I can see where you would have concerns about it, I'd just never run into an issue with ID outputting a PDF. Have you run into these same problems using say Acrobat Distiller? It's always amazed me that adobe can't get PDF to work the same on any of their apps... just boggles the mind. heh
 
Very rarely do distilled pdf's have issues. At least in my experience anyway. If your profile is written correctly and all of your requirements are properly coded, then everything works fine. I'll admit it took some doing and some help to write mine.
You'd think that Adobe, the inventors of the PDF would have it wired and that all their pdf profiles would be the same. After all, Distiller is a part of Acrobat and Acrobat is exclusively Adobe and they got it right there...Thing is, I work on a number of publications and magazines, I get in files ( images, illustrations, word docs etc. ) from other design firms around the world that have to be inserted into the pages that I'm designing. 40% of these files are disasters that I usually end up having to fix due to time restraints and deadlines. So, I'm really picky about the quality of my docs. I don't need some pre-press jockey calling me at 2pm ( when I sleep, I work at night ) bitching that my files are no good.
 
Back
Top