Printing an album cover for our band - any issues?

Ten

Hello H/A,

I've prepared some album artwork for my band and I'm going to send it off to the printer this week, but I was hoping somebody with some knowledge in the area could perhaps give it a once over and make sure I'm not going to hit any problems? It's costing a fair bit to get this printed and I want to make sure it's going to come out well.

I've converted the files to CMYK and placed them in a PDF with trim marks, with 3mm bleed as specified by the printer. My main concern is that when I did a test print on my inkjet at home, the front cover came out quite dark, with a lot of detail being lost, particularly in the lower left corner.

Just for reference, this is designed to be an insert so one image will be printed on each side of a 120mm square piece of card/paper.

Here are the files, they are quite large but if anybody could take a quick look, that would be great. Otherwise, I'll just send them off and hope for the best I suppose!

Front (51MB)
Back (41MB)

Edit: Let me know if this would be better suited for the Artist's Corner, I figured since I wasn't actually after critique on the artwork this would be the better place

Dark Moon

Preface: I am a photographer, not a graphic design guy, so I can only comment on general "printing on someone else's hardware" problems. That said…

Did you do your proofing on a colour calibrated display? Not just manually calibrated, but properly calibrated with a device specifically designed to do so?

IF yes:
Your colours will still change a bit unless you've got printer profiles from your printer and soft-proofed in PS.

IF no:
Your colours are going to be boned to hell and back and you will need to do many, many test prints to get it right.

Either way, you'll of course want to get a test print done to check that everything is right before you start printing in bulk.

Ten

No, I've just been doing this on my usual monitor. The printer sends out a proof before doing the full print run but there's an extra fee if the artwork needs to be changed, so I'd prefer to get it right before hand.

I guess I'll do some research on colour calibration, hrmm..

Dark Moon

Pantone makes the calibrator I use. I also hear good things about the Datacolor Spyder series. Either option will probably run you north of $100, though - I don't suppose you've got any graphic design/photographer friends that you might be able to borrow one from?

Ten

Dark Moon wrote: »

Pantone makes the calibrator I use. I also hear good things about the Datacolor Spyder series. Either option will probably run you north of $100, though - I don't suppose you've got any graphic design/photographer friends that you might be able to borrow one from?

I have one friend who does graphic design so I'll ask her and see if she has something, she mostly does wedding invitations and things with single colours though so I think she just chooses the CMYK colours from a book or something. (I might be talking gibberish here, I don't fully understand the process)

Ten

She doesn't have one, as she apparently relies on the proofs from the printer to make sure colours are correct. I'm going to do a test print on her laser printer tomorrow and she'll try to help me through any problems.

Unfortunately, I don't really have the time or money to do this properly, I think I'm going to have to cover as many bases as I can in the next day or so and then just take the plunge and send it off :?

Szechuanosaurus

Hi Ten. I can take a look over the files this evening for you (it's 8am here so won't be for 12 hours or so). You probably don't need precision colour calibration for this job. Even if you do spend the bucks getting the hardware to calibrate your monitor, without the printer's colour profiles, a proofing grade monitor and some expert knowledge you aren't going to get an exact match anyway. It also bears noting that whilst the proofs your printer sends you will be reasonably accurate, they will likely be inkjet proofs on proofing paper. Therefore they won't completely accurately simulate what the print will look like whether it's a digital or litho print on the actual insert stock. Although it may be possible, if they are printing the inserts digitally they will just do a single print and send you it and it will be identical to the finnished product, if they are printing lithographically wet proofs are prohibitively expensive. What I can do is tell you if you are going to have any serious problems wrt illegibility etc. once I've had a look at the artwork.

Ten

That would be really awesome Szech, I would really appreciate your input. I'm only doing a 250 unit run so I imagine it's a digital print of some kind, they specialise in small runs so I doubt there is much overhead per job.

http://www.gr8printing.com.au is the place I'm going to be using if that helps at all.

I look forward to your thoughts!

Wezoin

I doubt colour calibration will make any real difference - I work at a copycentre/printer and we just use uncalibrated Dell cheapo monitors. We will typically play with printer driver settings to get the colours looking decent though, but typically if it is set to CMYK then its going to come out looking near enough how it looks on the screen. Basically, if it comes out dark on their printer then it needs to be lightened, if it comes out light, it needs to be darkened, but there is no way for you to predict how it will come out on their printer based on how it comes out on yours. If you really want to avoid the fee maybe tell them to print the proof and then let you do your adjustments and send a new file for them to print from.

tl;dr: Drivers and printers have biases to either make things lighter/darker/redder/blueer/yellower/etc, trust them to sort it out for you or look at your proof and make an educated guess as to the adjustments you'll need yourself.

Ten

Actually the fee applies if I have to send them a new file, I'm not sure if they do any tweaks or changes to the artwork themselves but I assume not.

Szechuanosaurus

Ok, just got the back open just now. There's a couple of things of concern here.

Firstly, there's some sort of logo next to the CC copyright logos which may be barely visible, if at all. Secondly, the background image in generally is pretty over saturated. The CMYK values in the darkest areas total around 300%. I'd suggest that the CMYK values not exceed 250%. Above that you can start to run into problems of over-saturation, paper may not hold it, it will bleed into reversed out text and you will loose definition between similar colours a lot more easily.

You should also be aware that the darkest colours here are likely going to print a dark brown rather than black. The large dark area is composed of a colour which broadly has the values C75%, M67%, Y67%, B89%. With the C,M and Y values so high, they will discolour the black and make it brown (I don't think this will necessarily be a bad thing for the design but I've encountered enough people complaining that their brown printed brown when they wanted black to not overlook it).


Looking at the front cover, you're right, you may well loose most of the detail on the bottom left corner (incidentally, if you can see detail on the bottom left corner on your monitor, I think the brightness on your monitor might be too high). My monitor isn't calibrated to anything but my eye, but I would say you probably want to increase the brightness and contrast on the images on both the front and back cover by about +15 for both, maybe more depending on how dark you want to keep it.

The good news is, you've nailed the bleed and margins perfectly which, if this is your first time setting up artwork for print, is a miracle and a beautiful thing to see.

Ten

Awesome, thanks so much!

There's not much I can do about the artwork, unfortunately, I commissioned it a year and a half ago and I don't have the skills to make any changes to it myself, but I think I will do what you suggest and raise the brightness and contrast. Hopefully the over saturation won't cause too many issues.

The logo on the back cover is the artist's signature, I have it on a separate layer so I might brighten that up a bit separately to make it more visible.

This is my first time setting up artwork for print, so thanks for making me feel good It took me a couple of hours to get a process that works (plus liberal use of the clone brush to actually create those bleed areas, seeing as the image was created for the exact printed size)

Thanks again for taking time to look at this, I really appreciate it! (And if you're interested in how it comes out, PM me your address and I'll send you a few copies once it's done :P)

Sheep

I run a record label and I've been involved in the art press for my three releases. So far, everytime I got something back from the printer it was too dark. I just told them to lighten it up a bit and they came out fine.

Make sure you are printing on heavy stock otherwise the paper will saturate or you will see the reverse image and we don't want that.

Ten

Thanks Sheep, do you think Szech's suggestions of +15 brightness and contrast will be enough? I don't think the printer themselves will be doing any modifications to the artwork without additional fees.

What stock would you suggest? They offer all the way up to 300gsm, I was thinking of using around 170gsm but would heavier be better?

Ten

The album covers arrived today and they look great! Thanks so much for all your advice