Apple just unveiled Final Cut Studio 2, a significant upgrade to the industry’s leading video production suite that delivers new creative tools designed expressly for editors.Final Cut Studio 2 includes:- Final Cut Pro 6, which introduces Apple’s ProRes 422 format for uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes and support for mixed video formats and frame rates in a single Timeline- Motion 3 featuring an intuitive 3D environment, paint and new behaviors- Soundtrack Pro 2 with dozens of innovative tools for multi-track editing, surround mixing and conforming sound to picture

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.

It’s the little things that make a difference- and nowhere is that more true than in prepress. Prepress is a world where one little checkbox makes the difference between ‘easy’ files and ‘hard’ files.

Here’s a good example: “Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities”. Un-checking this one little box can make my life very difficult.

So what exactly does this box do? When you save a PDF from Illustrator, Illustrator will write the entire original AI file inside the PDF. This makes the file larger, but makes later editing of the PDF much simpler.

If this box is not checked, when you read a file back into Illustrator many bad things happen. Every line of text is it’s own box- there are no more paragraphs. Gradients are usually converted to shadings. Basically, editing of the file becomes extremely difficult.

Normally editing a PDF is the last thing your friendly neighborhood prepress person wants to do. Unfortunately, just because we receive a PDF file, does not mean it is a good file for printing. We often have to add bleeds, fix color modes and move things around to get files press-ready. Also, there are many customers who misspell words or mistype phone numbers, and it usually falls on prepress to fix these errors.

So please, help out your prepress people, and CHECK THAT BOX!!

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.

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

Everyone knows that software is expensive. Applications like Photoshop, Quark Xpress, or InDesign can cost hundreds of dollars, in bundles they can cost thousands. Sometimes though, the best bit of software for you job is free, or close to it.

Here are my top 3 MAC apps that are free or close to it.

• Linotype’s Font Explorer X- This is a fully functioning font manager for OSX. It is also completely free. This has been floating around for a while, but it was a beta version. The full release is now available. This software works just as well as the other font managers I have used, and has a couple of nifty extras. My two favorites are it’s ability to delete font caches (this fixes that annoying gibberish type), and it’s ability to get rid of extra system fonts. This tool will either delete or just move all extra fonts that have been installed on your system.
• Spine Calculator- This is a great little piece of “Donationware”. It does just what it sounds like- calculates spine sizes for your perfect bound projects. It has 17 paper thicknesses preprogrammed, and you can also enter custom sizes. Enter the number of pages and hit calculate! This is donatationware- which means this guy created this software in his free time, so be nice and help this guy out.
• FontBook- No, this isn’t Font Book that comes with OSX. This hand piece of software from Lemkesoft will print out samples of fonts. Point it at a folder, and it print out samples of every font in the folder for you. There are 30 different templates you can choose from. This software isn’t free though, but it is only $10. There is a trial you can download off of their website.

I hope these apps help you out as much as they help me!

There are a lot of people out there who cannot make PDF files because they lack the necessary software. If you are reading this, and you are one of these people, I have some help for you.

I have recently stumbled across 2 PDF writers for the PC. Both of these are free. I have to tell you, I haven’t tried either one; so don’t read this as an endorsement.

• CuteFTP
• Pdf995

Check these out, let me know what you think of them! Make sure you read all of the fine print too, I saw on the PDF995 page that you will get pop-up ads using the free version.

Have ever ever received a file and not been able to figure out what application it was created in? No icon, no extension- just a file name like “flyer”.

The easiest way to determine what the type of file is is open it in a text editor! This doesn’t work so well with really large files, but just about anything can be opened in Note Pad (PC) or Text Edit (MAC). Usually the information you are looking for is right there on first two lines. It can sometimes be hard to decipher what the head means though. Below is a list of some file headers for the most common file types in graphic design.

• %!PS-Adobe-3.1 EPSF-3.0 - First line in an EPS file. EPS and Postscript are pretty easy to understand; most of the creator information is on the first few lines of the file. Be wary, it might not say EPSF! There are several types of EPS files, EPSF just happens to be the most common.
• %PDF-1.3 - This is usually the first line in a PDF file. The number will change depending on the PDF version#. These can be tricky though because Illustrator use a similar file header.
• %PDF-1.4 - This can start an Illustrator file as well. The best way to tell them apart is to scan down a few line. If after the %PDF line, there are some line starting “Metadata”, or “Cropbox”, and then about 10 lines down you see the EPS file header, it’s an Illustrator file. Illy files are an amalgamation of PDF, PostScript and proprietary formatting these days.
• MMXPR3 - This is the file header for a QuarkXpress document. I have been told that the number at the end of this string indicates the version of Quark that generated the file, but I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that statement.

That’s it for the file headers I know how to recognize right off the bat, but I have one more tip to share…

Image Files- Photoshop writes quite of bit of metadata into file headers these days, so more than likely, if you have an image file, the first few lines will have the information you need. You might see a line that looks like {tiff:BitsPerSample}- that means it’s a tiff file. Long lines of ASCII gibberish can indicate and image as well.