Settings for Digital Images and Documents

About Self-Service

Self-service printing is here for convenience, but our printers are complex machines that interact with complex software. The output is dependent on the knowledge and detail that you put into it. We’ve assembled these educational resources to help you work towards best practices with SAIC’s digital imaging output technology.

Each project is different and achieving the highest print quality entails a process of experimentation and fine tuning. In the pursuit of perfection, you should be prepared to encounter challenges of print production that will require your own time and attention to detail, and may result in mistakes and lost materials and ink. Otherwise, a professional service like Service Bureau should be used for predictable and reliable results.

The Print Workflow 

The workflow refers to the tasks – such as preflight checking and color management – that make sure that what is sent for output is accurate and correctly formatted for the destination printer.

Taking the right steps to control your desired output is called the “print workflow.” The more thorough your preparation, the more effective your print project will be, so the execution of any print project must be carefully planned.

We’ve posted “Workflow” guides for a variety of software and printing contexts in this section of the website. Whether you’re producing a wide-format photographic print, designing a pamphlet or poster, formatting a thesis, or plotting an architectural rendering, these guides will help you navigate each software in a best practice with SAIC’s print environment.

Color Management

RGB versus CMYK

 

Spot Colors
 – Spot Colors versus Process Colors in Ink Manager
     -If you insist on using spot colors, at least distinguish between Pantone colors for coated versus uncoated papers
 – How to test color conversion in Adobe software
 – Colorimeter

 

The Structure of Digital Images

Data Bits, Pixels, Ink Dots and Density

Printers do not reproduce an image by tiling pixel squares directly on top of one another. Rather, they reproduce an image by spitting out tiny dots consisting of a mix of four colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (black) – or sometimes more – which combine to create a range of hues by the subtractive color model.

 

 

There is bound to be some space between these dots, and this is what DPI measures: their density. For example, if you are printing a 150ppi image at 600dpi, each “pixel” will consist of 16 dots (600 dots/150 “pixels” = 4 rows of 4 dots per “pixel”).

Raster versus Vector

Conversion Risks of Strokes, Outlines and Blending Transparencies

 

Image Resolution, Transparencies and Sampling

Conversion Risks of Strokes, Outlines and Blending Transparencies

 

 

Rendering Intents

Relative Colormetric

Compares the extreme highlight of the source color space to that of the destination color space and shifts all colors accordingly. Out-of-gamut colors are shifted to the closest reproducible color in the destination color space. Relative Colorimetric preserves more of the original colors in an image than Perceptual. This is the standard rendering intent for printing in North America and Europe.

 

Perceptual
Aims to preserve the visual relationship between colors so it’s perceived as natural to the human eye, even though the color values themselves may change. This intent is suitable for photographic images with lots of out-of-gamut colors.
Saturation

Tries to produce vivid colors in an image at the expense of color accuracy. This rendering intent is suitable for business graphics like graphs or charts, where bright saturated colors are more important than the exact relationship between colors.

 

Absolute Colormetric
Leaves colors that fall inside the destination gamut unchanged. Out-of-gamut colors are clipped. No scaling of colors to destination white point is performed. This intent aims to maintain color accuracy at the expense of preserving relationships between colors and is suitable for proofing to simulate the output of a particular device. This intent is particularly useful for previewing how paper color affects printed colors.

Color across Platforms

 Synchronize your Adobe Settings
Define default color settings in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign. Make these settings standardized across all Adobe software on your computer device.
Go to Edit > Color Settings.
 
Proofing in Adobe 
     – Default Print Driver, Adobe Print Production, PreFlight, Lightroom?
Knowing your output
     Paper media options