For the serious photographer or designer, one of the most frustrating things can be converting your images from color to black and white. Often times, people will just click Image->Mode->Grayscale, then either leave the image as is, or use curves to adjust.

There are several better ways to do this in Photoshop- methods that give you much more control over the contrast range of your images as you convert them to black and white. I am going to show you some of the better ways to do this, including the new tools. First, let’s start with a nice, colorful image to convert.

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A common question at Bargain Printing is, “What type of fold should I choose?”

Here is a rundown on the common types of folds:

Bi Fold - Commonly referred to as a short or long fold. It is just one fold made to the paper in either direction.

A short fold, would be a fold across the shortest dimension of the paper. For example, a short folded 8.5″ x 11″ sheet would fold down once to 8.5″ x 5.5″

A long fold, would be a fold across the longest dimension of the paper. For example, a long folded 8.5″ x 11″ sheet would fold to 11″ x 4.25″

Tri-Fold - A fold where a three panel piece has both side sections folded inward, one on top of the other Each section is approximately 1/3 the length of the piece. Also known as a C-fold or letter-fold.

Z-Fold - A paper fold represented by back and forth folds into three panels.

That pretty much covers the typical fold types when printing a brochure. Another good term to know is scoring. Scoring is a crease applied, in a straight line, to a sheet of paper to allow it to fold easier and more accurately.

Quark has some new items available for download.

A free upgrade to Xpress 7.0.2 is now out. There are several new features and several bug fixes as well. This is a free upgrade, so if I was you, I would download it.

Also, there are a set of Xtensions called Xpert Tools Pro available for free as well. I have downloaded these Xtensions and love them. There are a bunch of productivity enhancing features in here.

So I had the interesting experience today of teaching our intern how to create a die-line. He had no idea what a die-line even was! Interns, gotta love em :P.

This brought up a long conversation between several of us about the technical knowledge that many designers seems to lack. While there are tons of classes out there that claim to teach someone how to be a designer, often times they miss some of the most critical (technical) aspects of designing for print.

A case in point would be pocket folders. To the left is a pocket folder die. A pocket folder is printed on a larger sheet, and then a blade (die) in the shape you see is used to cut the out the folder. Once cut, it is then folded and glued.

Now, in looking at this die, what do you see? The basic shape of a folder, right? Now think about how it will fold… The bottom flaps (with tabs on the outsides) will fold up! So any copy that is going to be on those tabs needs to be “upside down” relative to the rest of the copy to end up “right side up” on the finished product.

Now this is a pretty simple example, but what if you are looking for a ‘pocket folder’ that is a gate fold? Basically a “three-panel” pocket folder (Pockets left right and center!) How would that be setup?

The point that I am poorly attempting to make here, is that while it is not always the designers responsibility to create these a die file, it is their responsibility to know what they are, and how it will effect the finished product.

In those cases where a designer needs to create a die line, PICK UP THE PHONE! Call your printer, find out what the requirements for the die are. Even if they don’t know, they will more than likely be able to find out for you.

Way back when, there used to be a little company called “Macromedia”. Some of you older heads might remember them. For a long time they were the big name in web development- until they were bought out by Adobe.

Macromedia had a great section on their website called the “Exchanges”. These were essentially forums where users could post scripts, plug-ins, actions etc. for every Macromedia product.

When Adobe took over Macromedia, they not only kept the Exchanges, but expanded them to cover many of Adobe’s products as well. If you have never been on the Exchanges, I would highly recommend it.

The Illustrator exchange has custom brush libraries, and all kinds of templates, as well a some useful plug-ins. The InDesign exchange has some really cool stuff, including scripts that will create editable calendars in InDesign.

Sometimes the hardest part of getting started on a design is choosing the color palette you are going to use. Well, fear more! The ever helpful internets have come through again with website that will give you a hand in picking those colors.

One such website is run by Adobe Labs. Kuler is a great site- it lets you choose up to 5 colors in your palette, and you can input in a wide variety of color models. CMYK, RGB, HSV, LAB and HEX are all supported. You can even register with the site and save and publish your palettes. The publishing is in “.ase’ files. You can open these in any of the Adobe apps as swatch libraries.

The second site is ColorBlender.com. ColorBlender isn’t as robust as Kuler, but if you get confused by all of the options on Kuler, this might be the best spot for you. The controls are simple, either RGB or HSV input. The best part of this site is the ability to export the color tables as either Photoshop ACT color tables or Illustrator EPS files- so you don’t have to manually enter the colors into your files.

• Camera: At least 2 mega pixels

• Resolution: The highest your camera can provide

• Size: 300 ppi/dpi (pixels per inch /dots per inch)

• Image Format: TIF or uncompressed JPEG

• File Format: CMYK

• Maximizing Print Output: Images at least 300 dpi, CMYK file format, allow at least 1/8? area all around if you work with bleeds.

Our contest is open to designers, printer representatives and our paper distributors.

What to do?
Download the Neenah Paper PAPERWORKS Contest entry form.

PAPERWORKS
Contest

Download the Neenah Paper PAPERWORKS Contest entry form. Send in 5 samples (do not mount, fold, staple, or mark on) along with the completed entry form to:

Neenah Paper
Attn: Awards Competition
3460 Preston Ridge Road, Suite 600
Alpharetta, GA 30005

Please note that entries cannot be returned and only first postmarked entry of “like” design is eligible for an award. Entries will be acknowledged through e-mail only.

Letterhead - Bi-monthly Contest
The letterhead contest is judged bi-monthly. There are three (3) winners [Gold - $500, Silver - $300 and Bronze - $150] for each of our three sales regions in North America – that’s nine (9) total letterhead winners every two months or 54 winners per year!

Each winner will receive two mounted plaques displaying their winning letterhead and their appropriate monetary award. In addition, all Gold regional award winners compete for the Letterhead of the Year Design check for $1000.

Print out the PAPERWORKS Contest form using the gold button above and let us see if we can make you a winner for specifying NEENAH!

I know there is a lot of confusion out there as to just what an ICC profile does. You can read as much as you want to about what is in a profile and how to use the, but until you actually see it with your eyes, it is hard to understand what everything means.

To start this off, I thought we would take a look at RGB profiles. RGB profiles are used by digital cameras, scanners, and your monitors. When you take a digital picture or scan a print, an RGB profile comes into play. The two most commonly used profiles are sRGB and Adobe RGB (1998). The sRGB color space is the default color space for Windows. Adobe RGB (1998) is the generic profile that Photoshop uses (in the US or North American Prepress Defaults).

Below is two copies of the same image. There is only one difference; the embedded profiles. The image on the left has the sRGB color space embedded, and on the right the Adobe RGB (1998) space.

Just changing the RGB profile of the image makes a difference in color. So when you are working in Photoshop on the pictures, beware! If you spend hours working on color, and then change your profile, all of you hard work is lost.

Also be warned- when you convert to CMYK, if you choose a different source space than the one you were working in, you can get drastically different color.

In an age where “Image is Everything”, there is an overflow of services that provide consumers with top quality, high resolution stock photos that can be used to promote your business. What happens when a designer needs images of the company’s product?
If your company is small to medium size with little or no budget to plan a professional photoshoot, you turn to your personal digital camera hoping to achieve an outstanding image quality - not considering what it takes to convert that image and prepare it for offset printing.
Although digital images might look great on a computer monitor, often the quality is poor when these images are reproduced on an offset printing press.

BargainPrinting.com comes across many clients on a daily basis that followed that path and we have been working with them to educate them about what it takes to get a digital image from an “1-shot” personal camera printed without compromizing quality, although we do not recommend that you follow this path.
To ensure that your photos are print quality, follow these guidelines for selecting a digital camera, choosing the proper settings, and handling image files. Keep in mind that images of conventional film camera properly scanned yield the best quality printed material followed by a “3-shot” professional digital cameras.

READ TOMORROW FOR PART 2 - CHOOSING A DIGITAL CAMERA AND CAMERA SETTINGS