Laboratory Resources

What You See Is Not Necessarily What You Get

Because of differences in how colors are viewed, how good your monitor is, how hold your monitor is, and how well your monitor is calibrated, what you see on your monitor is not necessarily what you will get in print. Once you have received samples of what we printed from your files, we recommend that you adjust your monitor to match the final printed output. That way the next image you create will look more similar on screen and on paper. We also suggest that once you like the way your image looks on screen, lighten it slightly, especially in the midtone area, as it will most likely darken slightly when printed due to the nature of printing.

Most applications will give you the option to work in either CMYK or RGB color mode. It is fine to begin working in RGB, there are some filters in Photoshop that are only available when working in RGB mode. Just remember to convert to RGB before submitting your images to us. Keep in mind that it red, green and blue light create more colors than cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks do. Therefore, your image may look a little different in RGB than in CMYK. If we must do the conversion here, we are not responsible if you are not happy with the conversion results.

Please save all bitmap images (like those out of Photoshop) in either tiff or eps format if you will place them in a layout program. If it is for final printing, tiff, eps or jpg with maximum quality format is acceptable. we cannot print gif, pict, dcs, ping, psd, cds, etc. formats. Please do not save your images with LZW compression. Placing an unacceptable format in an acceptable format does not make it useable.

Image Resolution

Image resolution of raster or bitmap image files should be set to 300 dpi at the final image size in your layout. If you enlarge an image, you lower the resolution, if you reduce an image you increase the resolution. We do not recommend enlarging an image in your layout program more than 125%, or reducing more than 30%. Images with a resolution of less than 250 dpi will reproduce poorly on press, looking fuzzy, choppy or pixilated. Resolutions higher than 300 dpi will not appreciably improve image quality, just make for a larger file size, which increases your upload times and our imaging times. Images captures off the web are only 72 dpi. (With the exception of online stock photography) They are not suitable for printing. Images created in Paint are only 72 dpi, and not suitable for printing.

IMAGE FILE FORMATS

JPG/Jpeg—Great for photographic images on the web, because it compresses the file (makes it smaller). Not ideal for printing, because every time you save it, you lose more color and detail. JPEG files can be printed at 300dpi at or smaller than 100% of image size at that resolution, but CANNOT be enlarged without losing sharpness.

TIF/Tiff—Great for photographic images for printing. TIFF files can compress using the LZW compression algorithm without loss of color or detail. TIFF files can be printed at 300dpi at or smaller than 100% of image size at that resolution, but CANNOT be enlarged without losing sharpness.

EPS (Vector)—The vector type of EPS file—created in Adobe Illustrator® or Macromedia Freehand®—are the best for logos because the image is made up of shapes that are defined mathematically—when they are printed, the printing device creates them on-the-fly at whatever size and resolution is needed, as big as a building, as big as a planet.Vector EPS files CAN be printed at ANY size without losing sharpness UNLESS they have photographic images embedded in them.

EPS (Continuous Tone)—There is a continuous tone type of EPS created in Adobe Photoshop® to save photographic images with special effects. The photographic parts of the file continue to act just like a .tiff file (see above).Continuous tone EPS files can be printed at 300dpi at or smaller than 100% of image size at that resolution, but CANNOT be enlarged without losing sharpness, because the image is not just made of mathematically-defined shapes. Saving a continuous tone image in EPS format does NOT make it infinitely scalable like a vector file.

GIF—Great- for saving graphics with large blocks of solid color to very small file sizes for the Web. Sometimes works well for photographic images on the Web as well.Gif files must be converted to 300dpi CMYK .tiff files for printing, and once this is done can be printed at or smaller than 100% of image size, but CANNOT be enlarged without losing sharpness.GIF colors are also not continuous tone, so will appear posterized when printed. Avoid printing from GIF files if at all possible, as they are rarely high enough resolution to be used that way.

PNG— A raster file type developed by Microsoft® for use in Microsoft Office®. PNG files are rarely of high enough resolution to be printed from, are not continuous tone so will appear posterized, and are in Indexed color space so will need to be converted to CMYK .tiff format for printing.

WMF— A vector file type developed by Microsoft® for use in Microsoft Office®. Allows scaleable graphics to be imported into Word. While WMF files are vector files similar to Illustrator files, they don’t allow for curved vectors. Curved lines will be converted to short, straight lines, distorting the graphic. If you are going to use WMFs, particularly if there is type involved, make them several times larger than you are going to use them. They are also saved in RGB color space, so will have to be converted to CMYK .tiff files before printing.

BIT DEPTH

The number of colors you can see in a given pixel is determined by the bit depth that has been captured, the bit depth that can be processed and the bit depth that can be displayed. Generally you want more in all cases, but the size of the files go up exponentially as bit depth increases, and the speed at which those files can be manipulated and displayed are determined by that size. Bit depth is used differently and acts differently depending on where it is being used; how it it is used in a monitor isn’t necessarily how it is used in Photoshop.

Bit
Binary Digit; the bit is the smallest unit of processing in the computer; it can only hold 0 or 1; or “on” or “off.”

Byte
A byte is made up of 8 bits. A byte holds the equivalent of a single character, such as the letter A, a dollar sign or decimal point. For numbers, a byte can hold a single decimal digit (0 to 9), a number from 0 to 255 (binary numbers), or a single level of grey.

Color Bit Depth:

1-bit color	2 colors, either black or white (earliest computers)
4-bit	2x2x2x2 — 16 colors (limited greyscale)
8-bit	256 colors (early VGA and SuperVGA PC monitors, which explains the 256-color Web pallet and GIF and PNG files being restricted to 256 colors)
16-bit	HighColor (32 levels red × 64 levels green × 32 levels blue) 65,536 colors; more colors generally dithered from these.
24-bit	Truecolor (256 levels of red x 256 levels of green x 256 levels of blue) 16,777,216 colors [Macintosh II, 1987]
32-bit	16,777,216 colors (or more) + 1 alpha channel (in the case of your monitor, allows translucent windows, fading menus and shadows)

Bit depth increased as processing power increased. Everything below 24-bit color is only a rough interpretation of actual color, requiring a lookup table that renders the closest approximate color.

A standard pixel in an 8-bit channel RGB Photoshop file is made up of 3 bytes of data: 1 red byte, one green byte, and one blue byte (in other words, 256 levels of grey in each of the Red, Green and Blue (RGB) channels). Sometimes that is not enough; black and white images scanned to an 8-bit greyscale channel often look posterized, and extensive image manipulation of 8-bit-per-channel color images can result in color banding. Scan black & white images at 32-bit or higher, and create igher bit-depth files if the files will be manipulated a lot.

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