[syringe]

Hi there,
MY partner is currently designing adverts in Photoshop.
Usually, starts off making the background, adding a couple of images, and eventually the text.

When the adver is printed, the text is very unclear/pixelated, which im unsure why.

Until lately, she has been sending the adverts in Jpeg format, which means the text becomes rastersized (im im right?)

Last week, i exported the Advert to PDF which retained the text to vectors (i.e no matter how scaled up/down they retained quality), but the text still came out pixelated.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
Any other format i could send the advert in that i know i could keep the text quality?

[turtile]

I would use tiff format. JPEG will make it blurry since it works by grouping simular colors which will make the text look bad due to the fine edges.

You should also make the file at 300 DPI. If you print it at 72 DPI, it will be hard to read.

Also make the document the same size.

[joshd]

isnt it best to leave them in .psd if they are for printing?

yes, like turtile said, make sure the resolution is never lower then 300dpi when commercial printing.

[stoopertrooper]

Turtile and joshd are right. One thing I might add is this:

Is this for output to a printing press that uses plates? If the output is to bromide, film or directly to plate the image that will be printed on a printing press a resolution that is twice the halftone screen frequency measured in lpi (lines per inch) is recommended.

So for a final output frequency of 150 lpi, typical of high quality glossy magazines you need to work with image resolutions of 300 ppi (pixels per inch).

[syringe]

300 ppi? isn't dpi (dot per inch)

what's the difference between ppi and dpi?

[joshd]

nothing.

if it is for commercial plate printing, you will also want to produce it in CMYK colour, otheriwise you will end up using out-of-gamut colours.

[stoopertrooper]

Josh D is right , essentually they are the same and they are often used interchangably. Really technically DPI (dots per inch) is more commonly used when discussing printer output or the resolution at which you scan an image to a computer. PPI (or pixels per inch) is what Photoshop uses to measure screen resolution.

Either way they affect resolution which probably your issue.

Pixels are like little storage blocks for showing graphical data. The more pixels you have, the more colors you can use and the more detail you can show.

If we have 2 copys of the same picture, one is 300 ppi and the other is 150 ppi. The picture at 300 will be more detailed then the 150 because for every inch, color and details are being represented with 150 more pixels than the 150ppi .

Also, like Josh said use CMYK color mode. If you have an image that is in RGB like from a digital camera, convert it early BEFORE you edit. If you wait to the end the colors are not represented the same and your image COLOR will look nothing like what you thought it would.




TO check what screen resolution you have go to: Image then "Image Size..."

[joshd]

that would tell you the print resolution.