Prepress Services

Prepress Services: Making you look professional

Prepress is the work that is done to turn digital files into printing plates. Traditional offset printing uses digital files that are turned into film and etched on plates. Prepress for digital computer to plate (CTP) technology bypasses this step.

Prepress services are part of the service we provide to keep you looking professional, and must be performed to ensure that your job prints properly.

Prepress involves:

  • Checking color separations
  • Checking bleeds and trim
  • Font matching/substitution

If creating a print ready file is beyond your capability, we can take almost any digital file and prepress it to make it print ready.

You may also want to take advantage of our creative services.

Having your artwork properly prepared will lower the amount of prepress time we need to spend on your file and save you money.

Here are some tips to help:

Use the right type of images
Images you get from the Internet will not print properly. Press quality images need to be 300 dpi (dots per inch). Images you get from the Internet will only be 96 dpi.

We accept the following formats:

  • Acrobat (pdf)
  • Illustrator (ai)
  • InDesign (indd)
  • Quark Xpress (qxd)

Files formatted in Word, Publisher, and Powerpoint are not suitable for print.

Check color separations

Offset printing with process color traditionally uses 4 colours Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK) to produce full color images. The applications listed above all allow you to do this. In addition, spot colors may be used wherein every color is represented by a particular ink.

To print properly, files myust be CMYK, not RGB. Word, Publisher and Powerpoint will only allow files to be created in RGB, and thus are not suitable for print. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Quark Xpress all allow files to be created in CMYK and are suitable for print projects.

Check Trim and bleed areasDon’t forget that printed products get trimmed. Something that you want to run off the edge of the page is called full bleed. Bleeds should extend a minimum of .125 inches from the trim line, and for safety should also be .125 inches inside the trim line.

FontsThe best way for us to reproduce your file exactly is to convert fonts to outlines and save your file as a pdf. This will ensure that your document prints exactly as you designed it.

If you send us a Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Quark file where fonts are not converted to outlines, you must include the fonts used in the document in order for us to print it.