Looking out from the 12th floor of the Xerox offices at Yonge & Shepherd the sun and sky make me think it’s mid-summer. But the glorious colours of the changing leaves assures me that it is late October. Mother Nature is really putting on a great show of colours – I hope you’re getting out there to experience it.
If you’re wondering why I am talking about the view from the Xerox offices you’re probably not alone. But no need to guess – I’m happy to explain. Last month I joked that I never thought I’d get excited about buying a machine that folds paper. This month I’m struggling with my excitement about a new digital press that we’re adding. It’s a giant upgrade over what we currently have – allowing for faster printing, larger sheets up to 47″ x 13″, the ability to duplex 28″ x 13″, and it has new special colour units so we can print fluorescent pink, silver, gold, and white, along with a couple of clear coatings. The fluorescent pink is really a game-changer when it comes to printing a wider array of special colours; it’s not really about the fluorescent pink itself, it’s what can be achieved using the pink PLUS CMYK. Vibrant reds and oranges are the easy ones – like the colours of the leaves these days – but it really works with a ton of colours. If you’ve got a designer or two who would like to learn more about this, and specifically how to design to take advantage of these new abilities our partners at Xerox offer an absolutely FREE instructional course. Reply to this message if you want more info and I will get you all set up.
It’s quite a monstrous piece of equipment coming in at just over 20 feet long! I am hoping it’s up and running within the next few weeks. As soon as it is we’ll be happy to come over and detail all the great things this new machine can do for you and your projects.
Along with the new machine we’re looking at getting some online automation software that will allow us to go direct from print-ready PDFs to the new press – skipping a number of currently required manual steps The software does the preflighting, prep, imposition and setup automagically. It’s really mind-blowing to see how well, and how fast it does it.
| ** IMPORTANT INFO ** – November 11 is Remembrance Day. We are open. – Start planning timelines for projects that need to deliver in December and early January. Get ahead of the chaos of Christmas shipping! – Couriers and Canada Post will announce their Christmas delivery cut-off dates in late November. Once we have them we will pass them along. |
Raster vs Vector
Last month we chatted about PDF proofs and the different kinds that we usually come across. In the conversation the terms raster and vector used so this month we’re going to explore them in more detail.
Raster
Simply put raster means that all of the elements in the file are made up of dots. If you zoom in you’ll see the dots or pixels. Zoom in on the vector file and it stays sharp and crisp no matter the size. With raster you are also very limited in what edits you can make, and those edits will primarily need to be made in a photo editor like PhotoShop. Adobe is making huge strides in providing tools to enable changes to be made to raster images, and change the size and resolution with much more ease, but it always comes with limitations and caveats.
Vector
Vector is often interchanged with “working file” or “editable” but that is not 100% accurate. Really what it means is that the file can be scaled to absolutely any size you want without any degradation in the quality. This is because a vector file is just a set of instructions for how the lines are drawn. To the viewer you see the lines and shapes, but to the software it’s just instructions. And the instructions are only committed when you output the file.
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Using a page layout program like InDesign your file is likely to be a combination of vector and raster graphics. All of the text you set in InDesign is vector, all of the JPGs, TIFFs, PNGs, etc that you place are raster.
Raster images need to be at least 300 dpi at their final output size to print sharp on press. With digital printing we can sometimes get by with lower resolution but 300 is still best. For large format we can go as low as 100dpi in most cases without any visual degradation, but just like with litho it your files are at 300dpi they will print sharp and look great.
If you were to send a file with 600dpi you could assume that it would print even better than 300dpi but you’d be wrong. For almost every thing printed there’s not need for more than 300dpi at output size.
On the next proof we send you, or even just on your PDFs, zoom in and try to identify the vector and raster elements.
A nice rule of thumb with PDFs on screen, and determining if it will print sharp, is to zoom to 400%. If your images look good at 400% in all likelihood they will look good when printed regardless of whether it is raster or vector.