WORKING WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
If you are scanning photographs yourself, save them as either
EPS or TIFF files as this will preserve the colour and clarity of
your images. If you are scanning a previously printed item, such
as a magazine photo, you will need to ‘de-screen’ the image,
blurring it slightly to avoid a moiré effect (see your scanning
software manual for more details).
GIF or JPEG formats compress the image and actually discard
information, causing colour shifts and blurriness. Don’t use
either of these file formats – they may actually print in black
and white and you won’t like the results.
When you are scanning, consider the final size your image will be used at. Always scan
photographs at 300dpi at the size you are going to use them. There’s no point scanning
a postage stamp at 300dpi and then blowing it up to a A4 size – use your scanning software
to help you calculate the output resolution. Conversely, scanning photographs at more than
300dpi will have little or no effect on the actual printed quality and will unnecessarily increase
file size and processing time.
Don’t enlarge or reduce your scanned images in your drawing/vector software (such as
Illustrator) – it’s always best to use an image-editing application such as Photoshop for this task.
When converting photographs from RGB to CMYK,
refer to the settings on the left (from Photoshop). In
the ‘Edit’ menu choose ‘colour settings...’. From the
window that appears, choose ‘custom CMYK’ from
the list in the ‘CMYK’ section of ‘working spaces’. For
uncoated, change the ink colours to Eurostandard
(uncoated) and the ink limit to 225%.
Scan black and white line art (i.e. a logo), at
Photoshop CS3 screenshot
1200dpi for best results. Any lower, and the logo
may look blurry. Pay careful attention to the CMYK
makeup of any ‘black’ in your logo. The automatically-created Photoshop black, for example,
provides 300% ink coverage (see pages 07 and 08). You may need to adjust the colour settings
in your application to get a black that is made from 100% black ink.
Make sure that any alpha channels are removed and all layers are flattened before finally saving
your image. You shouldn’t compress your image either, or it will cause problems. So LZW,
JPEG and ASCII encoding are all no-nos. And don’t use DCS files, LAB colour, Duo-tones or
Tri-tones either – convert them all to CMYK. Don’t embed any profiles as this may accidentally
override your settings. Images to be used on the black & white reverse of a job should be
saved as greyscale.
09
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