Large Format Digital Printing | Where
do you Start? | Substrates
& Solutions | Other
Areas
| Inkjet File Setup
Guide
Where do you Start?
Much depends on what you want to do with your ‘graphic’. Is it just a poster to get a message across, does it need to display a product, how big an area should it fill? There are countless questions that could be asked although a few basic ones is all we need to offer some solutions:
- What lifespan does the graphic have?
Is it a ‘one-off’ use or is it part of a travelling road show
- Where is it going?
Indoors or outside, in full sunlight or not.
- How big does it need to be?
Is it to fill a whole exhibition space or a small space on a desktop.
From these basic questions we can start to solve your requirements.
It all starts with the artwork, nearly all studios and designers are Mac based and use primarily 4 programmes (Quark
Xpress, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and Macromedia Freehand), but we have had to produce graphics from any number of less mainstream
programmes, Mac and PC. Whatever you have we will use it if we can.
There are however a few basic rules to remember here as well:
1. Files created in Illustrator or Freehand are generally ‘Vectorised’ files, they describe the difference between 2 or more points on a page, and as such can be scaled to almost any size without a drop in image quality.
2. Files created or scanned into Photoshop are bitmap files and have to contain enough information (resolution) to allow them to reproduce at a larger scale.
A simple rule of thumb is to see how many times bigger your original image is going to end up being at final size. (I.e. 4x or 40x larger), multiply this enlargement ratio by 100 to give you the dpi you need to be working at.
130mm x 130mm enlarged to 1950mm x 1950mm = 15 times bigger
15 x 100 = 1500 dpi/pixels per inch
It is not unusual to be working with files over 1GB in size these days as designers try to cover larger and larger areas, although a typical Pop-up with Photoshop background is usually around 250MB.
Turnaround times are getting ever tighter and although we can turn most jobs round within 2-3 days it relies heavily on the artwork and information coming in to us accurately and on-time. It is imperative that all elements to be included in the final image are included – fonts, EPS’s and other placed images. An accurate colour proof is always a benefit and where particular colours are very important this should be highlighted early on to allow us to run some colour trials before the final print run.
It is also worth noting that with the huge range of substrates available to print onto the inks will look quite different on a fabric to a paper to a polyester film, and that it is impossible to offer exact colour matching across such a diverse range.
Although images can cover huge areas when tiled we do have a limitation in single pieces of about 1500mm wide by as long as our roll lengths (typically 20m).
You may also wish to:
|
