you can usually get away with 200dpi for black and white if you're not printing onto really smooth or glossy stock
depends on the printer and the graphic, yeah.
Anything with sharp edges, like type or something, you want to stay at at least 300 dpi. If you're printing from an inkjet onto non-coated stock you can get away with less, as the ink will tend to bleed a bit anyway.
Monkeybomb, for that banner I would have set the graphic part up as an image at around 120 dpi, then imported it into illustrator or Indesign, put the type down on top of it as a vector image and exported the whole thing as a PDF. The faded background doesn't need to be super crisp, but if you wanted to keep the type sharp as a raster graphic you would have had to have the resolution around 300 dpi or so, which would have made for a gigantic fucking file size.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
but really, in this age of huge memory and giant hard drives, there ain't any damn reason to not work in as large a resolution as you can manage
i've done stuff for prints at 900 dpi before
just because i can
and the drop to 600 for printing sharps everything up nice
yeah, exactly. I always start off waaaaay larger than I need, then build my prototype and save it off, then drop down to the final size and resolution to do the finish work.
Rememer, kids - you can always decrease the resolution, but you can't increase it. Enlarging a tiny graphic looks like shit, but reducing a huge graphic only gets rid of info you don't need.
you can usually get away with 200dpi for black and white if you're not printing onto really smooth or glossy stock
depends on the printer and the graphic, yeah.
Anything with sharp edges, like type or something, you want to stay at at least 300 dpi. If you're printing from an inkjet onto non-coated stock you can get away with less, as the ink will tend to bleed a bit anyway.
Monkeybomb, for that banner I would have set the graphic part up as an image at around 120 dpi, then imported it into illustrator or Indesign, put the type down on top of it as a vector image and exported the whole thing as a PDF. The faded background doesn't need to be super crisp, but if you wanted to keep the type sharp as a raster graphic you would have had to have the resolution around 300 dpi or so, which would have made for a gigantic fucking file size.
The file size was >100MB if I remember.
I still need to learn what dpi vs screen resolution vs pixels per inch means.
That's not a request for you to explain it, it's just
I'd have to look at the stuff in illustrator and photoshop again when I get home to remember what I was looking at, but I remember some of the original images were in 72 dpi, but it would allow you to increase them. I don't know how that can possibly work. Maybe it was pixels per inch instead? See, I don't know.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited June 2007
dpi is the same thing as pixels per inch
dpi is number of pixels, or dots, per square inch
screen resolution is 72 dpi
in printing, you'll often see the term "lines per inch" or LPI
newsprint uses 80 lpi, which works out to 160 dpi
better printing processes often use 133 to 150 lpi, or 266 to 300 dpi
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
I'd have to look at the stuff in illustrator and photoshop again when I get home to remember what I was looking at, but I remember some of the original images were in 72 dpi, but it would allow you to increase them. I don't know how that can possibly work. Maybe it was pixels per inch instead? See, I don't know.
increasing the size of an image only increases the file size, not the fidelity. It won't add information to the picture that is not already there, it only "fuzzies" up as it increases as it adds more pixels by guessing at what color they should be.
I'd have to look at the stuff in illustrator and photoshop again when I get home to remember what I was looking at, but I remember some of the original images were in 72 dpi, but it would allow you to increase them. I don't know how that can possibly work. Maybe it was pixels per inch instead? See, I don't know.
increasing the size of an image only increases the file size, not the fidelity. It won't add information to the picture that is not already there, it only "fuzzies" up as it increases as it adds more pixels by guessing at what color they should be.
ahhh okay, so it just does some algorithm shit on it to figure out how to meet your requirements
neato, now I know!
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
I'd have to look at the stuff in illustrator and photoshop again when I get home to remember what I was looking at, but I remember some of the original images were in 72 dpi, but it would allow you to increase them. I don't know how that can possibly work. Maybe it was pixels per inch instead? See, I don't know.
increasing the size of an image only increases the file size, not the fidelity. It won't add information to the picture that is not already there, it only "fuzzies" up as it increases as it adds more pixels by guessing at what color they should be.
ahhh okay, so it just does some algorithm shit on it to figure out how to meet your requirements
neato, now I know!
see, you could have just taken your source photos and laid them out in illustrator on one layer, then add a layer above it for the type. Would have taken up WAAAAAY less disk space, and it preserves all the vector information of the type when you export the PDF.
Rank, will you teach me how to photoshop? Cause damn, you know more than I do.
what do you want to know?
Uh, shit, hold on. I'd have to review. I've got a wide assortment of questions i've built up since I started teaching myself photoshop. Fun fact; I've only been using photoshop for about 8 months now. Before then I didn't know how to color anything.
I'd have to look at the stuff in illustrator and photoshop again when I get home to remember what I was looking at, but I remember some of the original images were in 72 dpi, but it would allow you to increase them. I don't know how that can possibly work. Maybe it was pixels per inch instead? See, I don't know.
increasing the size of an image only increases the file size, not the fidelity. It won't add information to the picture that is not already there, it only "fuzzies" up as it increases as it adds more pixels by guessing at what color they should be.
ahhh okay, so it just does some algorithm shit on it to figure out how to meet your requirements
neato, now I know!
see, you could have just taken your source photos and laid them out in illustrator on one layer, then add a layer above it for the type. Would have taken up WAAAAAY less disk space, and it preserves all the vector information of the type when you export the PDF.
I believe you, but I don't know why that would be.
I've got a meeting for our network monitoring right now, though, so blah. Thanks for answering the questions, Matt.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
also if you're resizing a huuuge image to a small one for some reason (like for an avatar or something)
it's better to do it in increments: 1000 to 750 to 500 to 200 to 100 to 64
if you just go 1000 to 64 then the algorithm has to blend a lot of information into a small space and it just ends up being a blur
yeah, stepping down in halves is usually the best way to go. Also, play around with the blending options - there's a big difference between bicubic resizing and nearest neighbor and all that shit.
Also, hitting a graphic that has been sized down with a light unsharp mask (filters>sharpen>unsharp mask) will bring back some of your detail.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
or the color definitions like Adobe Gamut and such?
Or 8-bit, 16-bit, etc?
the first one
also why do people always include their palette on the side of a work print
k, second question first.
They put their palette on the side to quickly grab frequently used colors.
The RGB/CMYK thing is a bit more complicated.
RGB is the color space used for everything on the web. It uses the red/blue/green subtractive color method, because that's what your monitor does. It blends the three shades of light to create millions of other shades. Ever look at a monitor or TV with a magnifying glass? You'll see it at work. RGB subtractive method looks like this.
You can look at your channels (click the channels tab next to the layers tab) and see how each of the shades interact. You can see how much red, how much green and how much blue is used in your picture.
Now CMYK is the color space used in printing. It uses an additive color space by layering semi-opaque inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK) in a halftone pattern (halftone is the series of dots used in the printing method. I can go more into depth about this later if you want) to create the illusion of blended colors. Working in CMYK and analyzing your CMYK channels allows you to more accurately create work that is more true to how it will actually print, especially if you've got a calibrated monitor and are working in a CMYK gamut profile that is attuned to a calibrated printer profile - basically, if you've got everything finely tuned, what you see on the screen is pretty damned close to how it will actually print.
CMYK additive color looks like this:
the black is the result of using all three hues to create it, but printers nearly always have a black ink to allow a greater mix and control of the shades, plus it tends to be a richer black than you get from just mixing the three other inks.
High-quality professional printers often use multiple additional inks, like orange or green, to help increase the color quality. Orange, Green, Deep Blue and Brown are usually the most difficult to reproduce accurately in this color space as they often require delicate balances of the ink mixtures. Any variation can have very pronounced results. This is why, when you are shopping for a new printer, you should always look for broad areas of solid color with blue or green, to look for banding or strange shapes. The smoother they are, the better the printer. Same with gradients - if it can handle smooth gradients, it's a good printer, as they're notoriously difficult to control due to the halftone methods used, dot spread and minor variations in ink coverage.
Rank, will you teach me how to photoshop? Cause damn, you know more than I do.
what do you want to know?
Uh, shit, hold on. I'd have to review. I've got a wide assortment of questions i've built up since I started teaching myself photoshop. Fun fact; I've only been using photoshop for about 8 months now. Before then I didn't know how to color anything.
fedora, tell me about how you get the wonderful textures on your drawings
is it special brushes
give to me your brushes
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
Rank, will you teach me how to photoshop? Cause damn, you know more than I do.
what do you want to know?
Uh, shit, hold on. I'd have to review. I've got a wide assortment of questions i've built up since I started teaching myself photoshop. Fun fact; I've only been using photoshop for about 8 months now. Before then I didn't know how to color anything.
fedora, tell me about how you get the wonderful textures on your drawings
Rank, will you teach me how to photoshop? Cause damn, you know more than I do.
what do you want to know?
Uh, shit, hold on. I'd have to review. I've got a wide assortment of questions i've built up since I started teaching myself photoshop. Fun fact; I've only been using photoshop for about 8 months now. Before then I didn't know how to color anything.
fedora, tell me about how you get the wonderful textures on your drawings
is it special brushes
give to me your brushes
yeah, I've wondered that too.
because i have hundreds of crazy and custom brushes and i can do some pretty nifty texturing
but then fedora does a drawing and man it makes me feel embarrassed
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
lemme figure out how to export and package brushes and sure
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
edited June 2007
yeah, it just has to do with the way colors are created in the two mediums. Print is where it gets really complicated.
Before, I mentioned Spot Color. The CMYK is what is known as process color in the printing world, but is usually referred to as 4-color. Spot Color only uses one or more custom colors, like a 2-color printing could use black and red, or whatever. There's a whole huge collection of custom colors, usually defined by the Pantone Library, that can be used for spot colors, but most of the time printers and designers use standard colors, like Red or Yellow or Blue or Green or whatever. Because you can buy pre-mixed inks of those colors muuuuch cheaper than you can a can of Pantone 651C.
Spot color works exactly the same as screen printing. Same thing. You lay down one color, either as a solid or as part of a halftone screen (tiny dots in a pattern that get larger or smaller depending on how dense the color should be), then lay down your next color. Much cheaper than printing Process, and easier for the printer. Less to worry about.
You can access the pantone library in photoshop by going into the color picker and clicking on "color libraries. The Pantone library is just an industry-standard color set so that anyone can know exactly what hue you meant. Much more precise to say 255C than "medium purple". They have a metallic, a pastel and a standard color range, and they vary depending on if the paper is coated or uncoated - that's what the letter at the end of the number means. C is coated, U is uncoated.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
What kind of camera are you using? And are you shooting them as RAW, or just as JPEG?
It's a shitty 3 megapixel point and click. I can't remember the type off hand.
It saves them as JPEG. It, unfortunately, can't take them in RAW.
alright.
That's a shame, RAW is fucking badass.
make sure when you are shooting that you have it set at the highest quality possible. That reduces the jpeg compression, which is a lossy compression format, unlike ZIP or something.
make sure when you are shooting that you have it set at the highest quality possible. That reduces the jpeg compression, which is a lossy compression format, unlike ZIP or something.
Yeah, we shoot at the highest resolution and I never modify the original JPEGs.
I should run a batch that converts them all to TIFF, but I'm lazy and haven't done it yet.
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RankenphilePassersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderatormod
make sure when you are shooting that you have it set at the highest quality possible. That reduces the jpeg compression, which is a lossy compression format, unlike ZIP or something.
Yeah, we shoot at the highest resolution and I never modify the original JPEGs.
I should run a batch that converts them all to TIFF, but I'm lazy and haven't done it yet.
no reason to. If they're already JPEG, the damage is done. Just save any you work on as TIFF to avoid further loss and you'll be fine.
Also, RGB TIFF images compress VERY nicely using ZIP or RAR.
Posts
i've done stuff for prints at 900 dpi before
just because i can
and the drop to 600 for printing sharps everything up nice
depends on the printer and the graphic, yeah.
Anything with sharp edges, like type or something, you want to stay at at least 300 dpi. If you're printing from an inkjet onto non-coated stock you can get away with less, as the ink will tend to bleed a bit anyway.
Monkeybomb, for that banner I would have set the graphic part up as an image at around 120 dpi, then imported it into illustrator or Indesign, put the type down on top of it as a vector image and exported the whole thing as a PDF. The faded background doesn't need to be super crisp, but if you wanted to keep the type sharp as a raster graphic you would have had to have the resolution around 300 dpi or so, which would have made for a gigantic fucking file size.
yeah, exactly. I always start off waaaaay larger than I need, then build my prototype and save it off, then drop down to the final size and resolution to do the finish work.
Rememer, kids - you can always decrease the resolution, but you can't increase it. Enlarging a tiny graphic looks like shit, but reducing a huge graphic only gets rid of info you don't need.
The file size was >100MB if I remember.
I still need to learn what dpi vs screen resolution vs pixels per inch means.
That's not a request for you to explain it, it's just
well yeah it is
dpi is number of pixels, or dots, per square inch
screen resolution is 72 dpi
in printing, you'll often see the term "lines per inch" or LPI
newsprint uses 80 lpi, which works out to 160 dpi
better printing processes often use 133 to 150 lpi, or 266 to 300 dpi
increasing the size of an image only increases the file size, not the fidelity. It won't add information to the picture that is not already there, it only "fuzzies" up as it increases as it adds more pixels by guessing at what color they should be.
like,
pixels are the dots on computer screens
dots are the pixels when it's printed out
I thought there was something that I somehow didn't know about a pretty basic computer principle.
what do you want to know?
ahhh okay, so it just does some algorithm shit on it to figure out how to meet your requirements
neato, now I know!
yeah, basically.
it's better to do it in increments: 1000 to 750 to 500 to 200 to 100 to 64
if you just go 1000 to 64 then the algorithm has to blend a lot of information into a small space and it just ends up being a blur
see, you could have just taken your source photos and laid them out in illustrator on one layer, then add a layer above it for the type. Would have taken up WAAAAAY less disk space, and it preserves all the vector information of the type when you export the PDF.
topwise
Uh, shit, hold on. I'd have to review. I've got a wide assortment of questions i've built up since I started teaching myself photoshop. Fun fact; I've only been using photoshop for about 8 months now. Before then I didn't know how to color anything.
I believe you, but I don't know why that would be.
I've got a meeting for our network monitoring right now, though, so blah. Thanks for answering the questions, Matt.
yeah, stepping down in halves is usually the best way to go. Also, play around with the blending options - there's a big difference between bicubic resizing and nearest neighbor and all that shit.
Also, hitting a graphic that has been sized down with a light unsharp mask (filters>sharpen>unsharp mask) will bring back some of your detail.
what do you mean?
Like, the difference between CMYK and RGB?
or the color definitions like Adobe Gamut and such?
Or 8-bit, 16-bit, etc?
the first one
also why do people always include their palette on the side of a work print
k, second question first.
They put their palette on the side to quickly grab frequently used colors.
The RGB/CMYK thing is a bit more complicated.
RGB is the color space used for everything on the web. It uses the red/blue/green subtractive color method, because that's what your monitor does. It blends the three shades of light to create millions of other shades. Ever look at a monitor or TV with a magnifying glass? You'll see it at work. RGB subtractive method looks like this.
You can look at your channels (click the channels tab next to the layers tab) and see how each of the shades interact. You can see how much red, how much green and how much blue is used in your picture.
Now CMYK is the color space used in printing. It uses an additive color space by layering semi-opaque inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK) in a halftone pattern (halftone is the series of dots used in the printing method. I can go more into depth about this later if you want) to create the illusion of blended colors. Working in CMYK and analyzing your CMYK channels allows you to more accurately create work that is more true to how it will actually print, especially if you've got a calibrated monitor and are working in a CMYK gamut profile that is attuned to a calibrated printer profile - basically, if you've got everything finely tuned, what you see on the screen is pretty damned close to how it will actually print.
CMYK additive color looks like this:
the black is the result of using all three hues to create it, but printers nearly always have a black ink to allow a greater mix and control of the shades, plus it tends to be a richer black than you get from just mixing the three other inks.
High-quality professional printers often use multiple additional inks, like orange or green, to help increase the color quality. Orange, Green, Deep Blue and Brown are usually the most difficult to reproduce accurately in this color space as they often require delicate balances of the ink mixtures. Any variation can have very pronounced results. This is why, when you are shopping for a new printer, you should always look for broad areas of solid color with blue or green, to look for banding or strange shapes. The smoother they are, the better the printer. Same with gradients - if it can handle smooth gradients, it's a good printer, as they're notoriously difficult to control due to the halftone methods used, dot spread and minor variations in ink coverage.
fedora, tell me about how you get the wonderful textures on your drawings
is it special brushes
give to me your brushes
yeah, I've wondered that too.
because i have hundreds of crazy and custom brushes and i can do some pretty nifty texturing
but then fedora does a drawing and man it makes me feel embarrassed
Because you do way cooler textures than I can.
We would love you forever.
What kind of camera are you using? And are you shooting them as RAW, or just as JPEG?
I tried to keep it as simple as I could. There's a lot more going on there, but that's a pretty good basic primer of the two color spaces.
i knew that cmyk and rgb were for print and web but not why
It saves them as JPEG. It, unfortunately, can't take them in RAW.
lemme figure out how to export and package brushes and sure
Before, I mentioned Spot Color. The CMYK is what is known as process color in the printing world, but is usually referred to as 4-color. Spot Color only uses one or more custom colors, like a 2-color printing could use black and red, or whatever. There's a whole huge collection of custom colors, usually defined by the Pantone Library, that can be used for spot colors, but most of the time printers and designers use standard colors, like Red or Yellow or Blue or Green or whatever. Because you can buy pre-mixed inks of those colors muuuuch cheaper than you can a can of Pantone 651C.
Spot color works exactly the same as screen printing. Same thing. You lay down one color, either as a solid or as part of a halftone screen (tiny dots in a pattern that get larger or smaller depending on how dense the color should be), then lay down your next color. Much cheaper than printing Process, and easier for the printer. Less to worry about.
You can access the pantone library in photoshop by going into the color picker and clicking on "color libraries. The Pantone library is just an industry-standard color set so that anyone can know exactly what hue you meant. Much more precise to say 255C than "medium purple". They have a metallic, a pastel and a standard color range, and they vary depending on if the paper is coated or uncoated - that's what the letter at the end of the number means. C is coated, U is uncoated.
alright.
That's a shame, RAW is fucking badass.
make sure when you are shooting that you have it set at the highest quality possible. That reduces the jpeg compression, which is a lossy compression format, unlike ZIP or something.
it looks like shit when you print it out, idiots who make pamphlets out of tiny clipart images at my work
I should run a batch that converts them all to TIFF, but I'm lazy and haven't done it yet.
you got a problem with the industry standard?
no reason to. If they're already JPEG, the damage is done. Just save any you work on as TIFF to avoid further loss and you'll be fine.
Also, RGB TIFF images compress VERY nicely using ZIP or RAR.