Tips & Info

North Shore Printers has always embraced technology and been supportive of our clents, regardless of their level of expertise. That said, we offer some helpful reminders:

Microsoft software is not designed for professional high resolution PostScript output. Proper color separation is poorly supported or unsupported. We recommend using QuarkXPress and Adobe Creative Suite software.

If your project requires fonts, please send them along with your application file. Remember that if you use Adobe Type 1 fonts, both the screen and printer fonts are needed. Avoid using type styling features such as bold or italic, they often do not output correctly. Instead, use the actual fonts.

Raster images (photos etc.) should be high resolution, 300 dpi at final output size. Web raster images should be low resolution, 72 dpi. You cannot mix these. You can downsample a 300 dpi image to 72 dpi without a problem. It is possible to upsample a 72 dpi image to 300 dpi, but the results will be poor, usually very poor. A digital image that is 2592 pixels by 1944 pixels will be 36 inches by 27 inches at 72dpi camera resolution. Resampling this image to 300 dpi will yield an image size of 8.5 inches by 6.5 inches before any cropping takes place.

Photos for print are CMYK or Grayscale mode, never RGB where unexpected results are almost certain. Avoid jpeg type images whenever possible, they tend to use lossy compression which degrades their quality. Never resave a jpeg as a jpeg, further loss is very likely. We recommend tiff as a preferred file type.

Line art for logos and type should be vector artwork, rather than raster. 300 or 600 dpi type from PhotoShop will not look crisp and clean. Output resolution of vector artwork should be no less than 800 dpi. Artwork from Adobe Illustrator should be saved as eps, not as ai. Convert text to paths (outlines) if possible. Don't confuse PhotoShop eps with Illustrator eps, they are not the same. The first is raster, the second is vector. PhotoShop eps files are often used for Duotone mode.

MORE REMINDERS HERE