Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey, I'm Maja Faber and I'm a surface pattern designer from Stockholm, Sweden. In this class I will teach you all I know about preparing your files for print. We will go through how to prepare files for a print shop, for a print on demand site and for a client. Printing is a broad area of expertise and I'm not an expert on everything that has to do with this but I've been sending out files for print for over five years so I will teach you what I know about this which basically is all you need to know to be able to successfully prepare your files for print. The focus in this class is to prepare files in Adobe Illustrator. But in some parts of the class, I will show you the workflow in Photoshop and in design as well. By the end of this class, you will be able to successfully prepare your files for print, to send them to a print shop, upload them to a print on demand site, or send them off to clients. This is an intermediate class and you need to have at least a basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator to be able to follow along.
2. What You Need to Know: Before we begin diving into the lessons of this class, I just wanted to mention that it's built up so that you will learn the essentials of preparing your files for print. We want to a deep dive into printing techniques and other details that aren't necessarily to know to be able to prepare files. I will teach you what I know about printing and that's all you need to know to successfully be able to send off your work to get printed. This class is built up so that you will get a basic understanding to be able to prepare your file for print in the beginning of the class, where I shortly go through all you need to know theoretically. Then we move on to the more practical parts of this class where I will show you step-by-step how to prepare your file to a print shop, a print on demand site, and to a client. I'll go through the most common ways to prepare your files for these different purposes and we will use a combination of Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.
3. Your Project: > Your project in this class is to prepare a file for print, and either print it at a print shop or upload your file to a print on demand site.
4. When to Print in CMYK RGB Pantone: When you prepare a file for print, there are some things that you need to consider. One of those things is which color mode you should use in your file. How do you know which color mode you should use? Well, it's pretty easy actually. You just ask the print shop, your client that you should send your file to or you check the guidelines at the print on demand site that you're using. Some basic guidelines that you can follow is the print shops normally want CMYK files and print on demand sites often wants RGB files. If you're supposed to send off your work to a client, then just ask them which color profile they want the file in. Normally clients ask for CMYK or Pantone files. Next step when it comes to colors, is to know which color profile you should set up your document in. This is usually called an ICC profile. In the next lesson, I will show you all about this.
5. Color Profile: When you work with digital artwork, you need to set an ICC profile to your document. The ICC profile basically decides the color space of your document which then determines how the colors of the artwork will be printed. All monitors are slightly different, and you can't be sure that the colors you see on your screen will be the same as the colors on your printed artwork. You can calibrate your screen, which is a great way to get closer to the printed colors; I myself, actually haven't calibrated my screen, but as I have a high-quality Mac screen, I've found that they show colors close to the printed colors without being calibrated. There are many different RGB and CMYK color profiles. If you work with Pantone colors, just set up your document with a CMYK profile; I will show you the details later on in this class on how to do this. Some profiles that you might have seen or heard of are sRGB, Adobe RGB, Coated Fogra 39, and US Web Coated; these are some of the most common color profiles to use for printing files. Later on in this class, I will show you how to set up your document with these profiles, but for now, you should know that the file that you're supposed to print needs to have a certain ICC profile to make sure that your colors are printed correctly.
6. Bleeds: What is bleeds? Well, if you're supposed to print the design where the artwork falls off the edges, the printer needs some extra space outside of the edges filled with the design to make sure that when your design gets cut, your artwork will fill the whole space of the art print or whatever it is you're printing without being left a little white edge. To make sure that our design covers the whole print area, we add bleeds outside of the edge [inaudible] design in the file and fill this with the design that are falling off the edges. Note that you only need bleeds if your design is falling off the edges. If you print with a print shop, they often want you to add a bleed area and marks that tell them where to make the cuts. Although, this can be a little bit different depending on the print shop and also what type of material you're printing on. Always ask the place that will print your design if they want bleeds and what size of bleeds they want. Later on in this class, I will show you how to create bleeds in your document when it's needed.
7. Pantone Color Manager: Some clients or paint shops will ask you to change your colors to Pantone colors and specify them in your documents. To do this, you need to have the Pantone deck that are supposed to be used as digital swatches in your software. Some Pantone decks are already included in the Adobe suite, but some of them you need to get separately. Pantone has a software that you can buy, which will make it possible to use all of the switches from the decks in your Adobe softwares, is called Pantone Color Manager. So let's open up Pantone Color Manager and I'll show you how to add a deck to your software. You can access all of the decks by going to "View" and "Fandeck". To be able to use this guide in your Adobe software, you need to export it. If you will use it for print, you export it as LAB. Then we'll head over to illustrator to open that Pantone color guide. Go to your "Swatches Panel", open "Swatch Library", "Color Books", and the Color Guide that you exported. That's all you need to do to get access to this Pantone color Fandeck in Illustrator. If you want to add a Pantone Fandeck in Photoshop, you go to your Pantone color manager and export to Photoshop. Then double-click the foreground color, click "Color Libraries", and select your exported Pantone Fandeck. Now you can use all of the colors in this Pantone deck in your Photoshop file. So the last thing that I will show you in this lesson is how to export your Fandeck to InDesign. Head back to the Pantone Color Manager and hit export to InDesign and LAB colors. Then we head over to InDesign and open up your swatches panel, click the little menu and new color swatch. Change the color type to spot and here you can find your newly exported Pantone Fandeck. Now you can select the colors that you want to add to your swatches panel, and just click "Add". So later on in class, I will show you how to change all of the colors in your artwork to Pantone colors, as we go through how to prepare your files in the difference softwares.
8. To a Print Shop in Illustrator: The most common ways to prepare your file for a print shop is to use either Illustrator or InDesign. That's what I will show you here in this class. I have never used Photoshop myself to prepare a file footprint to print shop. So I can't show you how to do that. We will use Photoshop later on though, in this class when we prepare files for a print on demand shop. Let's start with how to prepare a file in Illustrator, to print at a print shop. The standard color mode for files to sent to print shop is CMYK. If you're drawing your design in Illustrator, the easiest way is just to start up a new document with a CMYK color mode. But as for me, for example, I draw my artwork on my iPad and then I export it and open it up in Illustrator. Now, I will show you how to change your color mode of an already existing AI document. Up to the left by your file name, you can see that you have an RGB color mode set to this document. You can also check the colors in your swatches panel. Here I made a color group of the colors. If I hover over the colors, I will see that they are RGB colors. Another place to see your color profile and color mode is to go to a File and Assign Profile, where you can see that you only can select RGB color profiles. You can also go to File and Document Color Mode and here RGB is selected. The first step to change your file to CMYK file is to go to File, Document Color Mode and change the color mode to CMYK. If you hover over your swatches, again, you can see that they still seem to be RGB, but these are the old swatches. If you save your swatches to the swatches panel again. I will just make a new color group. You can see that if you hover over now, they are transformed to CMYK colors. From here, the next step is to make sure that you have the correct ICC profile. If you have no idea of what I'm talking about, head over to the previous lesson that's called Color Profiles, where you'll learn the basics of ICC profiles, what it is and why you might need to change it. To change your ICC profile, you can first go to Edit and Color settings. Here, you can change the standard profiles for the working space of your document, which means the profiles that will open in your document if you select the RGB document or a CMYK document. My standard profiles are sRGB and Coated FOGRA39. That is because sRGB is standard for my digital work and Coated FOGRA39 is the standard for printing at print shops here in Sweden. How do you know which color profile to use? Well, you ask the print shop which ICC profile you should set in your document. To change your current ICC profile, you go to Edit and Assign Profile. Here you can change to another CMYK profile. You can select if you want to not color manage this document, if you want to use your working CMYK, or if you want to change your ICC profile to another one. As an example, I needed to change my CMYK profile to Web Coated swap v2, when a client that I worked with was supposed to send their files off to a print shop in the US. If you want to change your color profile, you select a new one in the profile box and hit "Okay", but let's change it back as I will print this with a print shop here in Sweden. The next step is to add bleeds to a document. As I mentioned in the previous lesson, you need bleeds when your design goes all the way out to the edges of the print area. Let's set up the bleeds, go to File and Documents Setup. As I will print this in Sweden, I would choose to add bleeds in millimeters instead of pixels. So let's change that. The standard size of bleeds to print in Sweden is three millimeters, but always ask a print shop how large bleeds they want. Let's change the bleeds to three millimeters. If you have the little change symbol typed in, all of the bleeds, the top, bottom, left, and right will change to the same size. If we want to have different bleeds on each side, which is rare, we just uncheck the little change symbol. Then I tap "Okay", and let's zoom in. You should see a red line outside of your artwork. What you do now is to drag the parts of your design that are reaching edges of the art board out to this red bleeds line. As I just have a flat background box, I drag my background out without affecting the rest of the artwork. Next step is to export this as a PDF. Print shops normally want PDF files, some might ask for AI, EPS, and JPEG, but as a standard PDF is what you send off to the print shops. We go to File and Save As. I will just create a new folder at the desktop. Select Adobe PDF as the format and hit 'Save". Here you have the PDF setting options. I usually start with the presets, and then make some changes if needed. For a print shop, I always save my files as Press Quality, but some print shops might want you to select another one of these presets. But as a standard, I always go for the press quality. At this first general options page, all you need to do is to decide if you want to create an open PDF where you can make changes or closed, locked PDF. This box, which says Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, means that if it's checked in, you will get a flexible, open PDF, and if it's not checked in, you get a locked, closed PDF. The difference is that you get a higher file size if you have the box checked in than if you don't. This all depends on if your print shop have preferences that says that you , for example, needs to have a low file size. Otherwise, I usually leave this checked in and create an open PDF, as it makes it more flexible for the future, if I want to make changes to the file. You don't need to mind the compression options page, I never change anything here. But at the Marks and Bleeds options, we will make some changes. This is where you make the settings to make sure that your PDF will show your bleeds and also trim marks. So check in Use Document Bleeds Settings and the Trim Marks. You can experiment with the other settings here. But for all of the prints that I've ever done, I only needed to care about the bleeds and the trim marks. The last setting that you need to make changes to, is the Output which has with the color profile to do. The changes we make here is to make sure that the print shop read your file as set to the ICC profile that you've chosen, so that you get the correct color space. Change the Color Conversion to Convert to Destination Preserve Numbers. The destination is our ICC profile, for me that is Coated FOGRA39. In the Color Inclusion Policy, I include the Destination Profiles. Then we're done with the settings and hit "Save PDF". Let's open up the folder and file. Here you can see that you have your bleed marks added in each corner so that the print shop knows where to make the cut of your prints. Now your file is ready to be sent off to the print shop.
9. To a Print Shop in Indesign: Let's have a look at how to prepare a file footprint in InDesign. Normally, you probably won't prepare file for print that is only artwork in InDesign. But if you, for example, are making some book or a flyer or whatever it is that you're making where you want your layout to be both text an artwork, then InDesign is the software to use. If you're interested in learning more about how to create layouts in InDesign, you can have a look at my class, create and publish your design look book here on skill share. So in InDesign, we can't open a PDF file, so we need to create a new document. I go to File, New and Document. Let's say that I want my art print to be A4 size. So I just hit "Print" up here, view all presets A4. I will use millimeters as that is the standard units here in Sweden. Everything else here is fine, but already here in InDesign, you can set your bleeds. So let's set our bleeds to three millimeters and then hit "Create". If you didn't set up your bleeds from the start, you can just go to File and Documents set up. Here you can change your bleeds or set up new bleeds. Now when I have my documents set up, I will just drag in my PDF or you can go to File and Place. But I will drag mine in from the art board. I will zoom out by holding down my Option key and scroll out with my mouse and click to Place my art print. To change this size on my art print, I hold down "Command and Shift", click and drag with my mouse to place it so that it covers my art board. So InDesign is a little bit different with the resizing. I will just resize the frames when I click and drag. For me that works fine. So I will just make sure that my art print covers my whole page, including the bleeds. If I click on this circle in the middle, I can arrange my artwork inside of the frame. But as I mentioned before, you will learn much more about this in my other class Create and Publish a Design Look Book. InDesign works a little bit differently when it comes to color profiles and color modes. So what you need to do here is to check that you have the correct ICC profile on your CMYK color mode in InDesign. So you go to Edit and Assign profiles. We will export this artwork as a CMYK. I want to choose the Coated Forward 39 as that is standard in Sweden. If you have another standard, for example, if you're in the US, you might have US Web Coated as a standard. They'll just change it there. But I will just hit "Okay". Because my color profile is the one that I want it to be. Then all we need to do is to export it as a PDF. So we'll go to File Export. Make sure that you have the Adobe PDF print selected in the format. I'm just going save mine to my desktop. Similar to illustrators, PDF export options, I will select the Press Quality as the preset. Here you can select if you want to export all pages or a range of pages. For us, it doesn't matter because we only have one page. Then we hit the Marks and Bleeds settings. What we want to do here is to use document bleed settings. So check in that little box. What you need to have up here at the print marks are the crop marks so that the print shop will know where your art board is inside of the beads. But I also usually include the bleed marks to make it even more clear. The last thing we need to do is to go to the output and the color conversion, you want it to say convert to destination, preserve numbers. Here at the destination, you can select to export it as a RGB, for example, but we will export it as a CMYK and my profile Coated Forward 39. The profile inclusion policy, I will include destination profile. So all of these settings is to preserve your colors and make sure that your colors are printed correctly. When you're finished, hit Export. Let's head over to desktop, our file and check it out. So here we have the bleed marks and the crop marks. That way it's really clear for the printing house to know where to cut your art print. Here you have your file ready to send off to the print shop.
10. To a Print On Demand Site: In this lesson, I will show you how to prepare your files for print, to upload it to on print on demand site. As an example, I will use societies six in this class, but you can really use this for any print on demand site. You just need to make sure that you check the guidelines for that specific print on demand site. Let's head over to society six to check their guidelines. Normally you can find some artist FAQ or some help center. I'll just scroll down to the bottom of the page and here I find artists FAQ. What I want to know is pixel dimension requirements. Let's click that one. Here we can see that the recommended file specifications is 6,500 pixels up to 16 thousand pixels, 300 PPI. RGB color space, file formats, JPEG or PNG, and file size limit 150 megabytes. So now we know that we need to have an RGB file. I think that I would save mine as JPEG. As I don't need to have a transparent background. If you want a transparent background, you can use the PNG instead. The dimensions. It all depends on what type of products you would want your design to be printed on. For this example, I will use only the art print dimension as I feel that, that is what my design are made for. But if you want to print your design on all products, I will recommend that you go on a larger pixel size, but I want a 4,000 times 5,000 pixels for my art print. Let's head back to Illustrator. The first thing we need to do is to change our color mode. Go to file document color mode and RGB color. Just the same as in the previous lesson. You can see up here by your file name, if you have an RGB color mode. After this, you can check which profile you have to your file. I have SRGB, so that's perfectly fine. As they didn't specify any color profile, I will just go for SRGB. After this, I will change the size of my art board. At the moment, I have millimeters as my units, so I will need to change them to pixels. Let's see if this works. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. I will just change all of these to pixels and hit "Okay" and see if it changed, no, it didn't change. What I do now is that I saved my file. I think that this is some bugs that the value doesn't change even if I change the units of the document. I will just close that file, open up a new document that is 4,000 pixels wide and 5,000 pixels high RGB color mode. Hit create. Now let's open up our print, check to see if it's still millimeters at that. I will just copy my artwork from my old file to my new file. As this is vector artwork, I can arrange to size however I want without losing any resolutions, I just pull down my options key and shift to click and drag to change the size and hold down my shift key. It seems as if I have all erasable strokes here. I think that this stroke is just left from the clipping mask from when I exported this from procreate. I will just delete that and I will just go in and check view outline to see if I have any other strange strokes. But I don't I would just go to view preview again. Now you can just arrange your artwork to your art board. I will click my background and makes sure that it is 4,000 pixels wide and 5,000 pixels high. Then I make sure that I align my background to my art board. I will lock my background by hitting command to, so that I can arrange the palm tree and the sun and the little island as I want it on art board. I will group these together, align them to the art board and to the center. Then I will go to object and unlock all. Basically here we have a artwork that is 4,000 pixels wide and 5,000 pixels high, It is in RGB color mode, and 300 DPI. Here comes the little tricky part, and that is, to make sure that this file is the right pixel dimension, 4,000 times 5,000 pixels in 300 PPI. I will go into Photoshop to finish the file because illustrator isn't as good with pixel dimension and DPI. You might not get the exact size if you export this in Illustrator. What I do next is to open Photoshop, create a new document that is 4,000 times 5,000 pixels and the resolution 300, RGB color mode, and the same color profile, SRGB. Hit "Create" and now I will copy all of my artwork from Illustrator. Command C, go into Photoshop and hit Command V. I will paste this as smart object. Hit "Enter" to place my artwork. If I go into image and image size now, I can see that my artwork is 4,000 times 5,000 pixels in 300 PPI. From here, I go to file and save as or go to my desktop and save this as a JPEG. Name the file. Make sure you have the embedded color profile checked in and hit "Save". Here make sure that I have a large file and baseline optimized. Hit "Okay" and let's check out our file. If I right-click the file and get info and more info, I can see that the dimensions of the file is 4,000 times 5,000 pixels. The color space is RGB, the color profile is SRGB. This is a private file to upload to society six as an art print. If your fight isn't PSD file from the start and not an Illustrator file. The steps are almost exactly the same. What you need to do is go and have a look at your image size. My image size is 5,000 times 7,000 pixels. I will just go in first and change the width to 4,000. Makes sure that I have the constraint proportionate checked in. Then I see that the height will be 5,300. That's fine for now. I hit "Okay." Then I will actually go in and select all of my layers and merge them. Now to change to the right size 4,000 times 5,000 pixels, I will go in and select ratio up here in the menu and hit 4,000 times 5,000. Then just arrange my art print and hit "Enter" and then it's the exact same steps as we did before and go to edit the same profile and makes sure that you have your correct color profile as RGB. Then we go to file and save as the JPEG. We can save it as number two, large file baseline optimized in a JPEG options and then hit "Okay" and here you have your finished file. It doesn't matter if you start your artwork in Illustrator or Photoshop when you prepare artwork, footprint on demand site, is always best to finalize the file in Photoshop so that you will get the right pixel dimensions and the right PPI. That's all for this lesson. In the next lesson, I will show you how to prepare a file for a client in Illustrator.
11. To a Client: In this lesson, I will show you how to prepare a file for a client, and we will do this in Illustrator. What I mean with preparing a file for a client is, when you don't send it off directly to Print shop, but for example, if you, like me are licensing your designs, you will just send the file to the client and they will print it on their products. As you can imagine, the specifications of how you should prepare your file for a client could be completely different depending on what client you work with. Normally, the clients that I work with, want to have CMYK or Pantone colors in the files, as we already went through how to prepare a CMYK file, when we had a lesson where I showed you how to prepare file for a print shop. I will in this lesson show you, how to prepare a file for a client that wants your artwork in Pantone colors, let's start. What we do first is to change our file to CMYK color mode because RGB is just digital, and in this case we will send it off to a client in Pantone colors, we need to have the filing in CMYK, so go to file, color mode and CMYK. The color profile doesn't really matter here, if you're supposed to send it off as Pantone colors, but I will go for my standard CMYK color profile. Then what I do, is to open up the Swatch library that I showed you, that we imported in the lesson about the Pantone color manager. For this example, I will use the Pantone FHI Color Guide, I will just open that up, here I have all of the Pantone colors that are included in that Pantone deck. First, I will do a copy of my design to have the original CMYK design on the left, and now we will change the colors of our artwork to the Pantone colors in this thick. The easiest way to do this is to first start with an automatic change of the colors, go to Edit Colors and Recolor Artwork, when you've selected all of your artwork. When you get this option box, you hit the little, Limits the color Group to colors in a swatch library box at the bottom of this options box, and you select your Pantone color guide, Pantone FHI color guide. I don't know if you could see that difference on your screen, but I saw a little difference in my screen, when the colors changed, when I hit okay, I now have all of these colors automatically change to Pantone colors. I will just create a colored group of the Pantone colors. For me, this automatic change of colors looks really good, but if one of your colors change dramatically, you can go in and see if you can a find the color that are closer to what you wanted from the beginning. Just to note that you can't print the whole color spectra that you have in the CMYK color mode as Pantone colors because Pantone colors are limited, but let's go into the green and see if we can get a little bit more forest green as our CMYK original is. I will just select this object, and check what that Pantone color is named, it's named 19-5414. Then I will go in, in my Pantone color guide and tap in 19-54, what was it? 14, select that color and then hit the little cross sign, and now I have that color selected in my Pantone deck, I know where in the deck that, that green color is. Now if I want to change this color, may well hit this "Command H" so that I don't see my selection, but I still have the palm tree selected. I can just go in and see if I find another color that are closer to the forest green, that was my intention from the beginning. I like this one better, so we can have a look at the original that was the automatic change and then the one that I choose manually, which I feel is closer to my original color and more forest green. Maybe I want to go in with the orange too and see if I can find something that looks a little bit more similar to the original one, I go in and have a look at the name Pantone 17-1140, I tap in 17-1140, select that Pantone color, hit the little box, and here we have the close by colors. Let's see what we can find, maybe I want something that is a little bit more popping orange, let's see, among these that we find this is that automatic changed, well here are some other, I think I will go for the one that Illustrator chose for me, for the orange color. Basically now you have changed your artwork to Pantone colors. We can just select our artwork again and create the Color group, so we know that these are the colors that are on our artwork. The next step that I would do to prepare a file for a client with Pantone colors is to create these little boxes, fill them up with the Pantone colors, then I would specify them in this document, we'll just use the text tool and specify the colors, this is a little bit easier if I hit the large list view or maybe even the smallest view in my swatches panel, then I just go in and type 13-1513, TPX, and the next one is 17-1140 TPX, next one, 19-5414, and the last color is, I got it wrong, its 59-17, it's 19-5917 because we changed the green color, and the last one is 15-1816. That's all that there is to it, and then we will just delete the CMYK colored artwork, you would, of course, arrange to the size that the client asked for, but I showed you how to change the size in the previous lessons, so you can check out those if you need to. Now I will actually say this as an AI. That's the most common preference for clients,but if they ask for JPEG or an EPS or a PNG, you would of course, export it as that, but I would just save this as Sunny day Pantone, hit "Okay", and here we have a file that is prepared to send off to a client.
12. Prepare a Pattern for Print: When it comes to preparing patterns for print, you basically just follow the same steps as the ones in the previous lessons. Although, what you need to make sure of is that your pattern is repeated seamlessly. In this lesson, I will show you how to make sure that it does. In this example, we will pretend that I will use this pattern at a print on demand site, so it will be in RGB. I will create a JPEG. If you would send off your work to a print shop or a client, is the same method. Just makes sure that you ask the client or print shop which file format and column mode and profiles they want, and then save it with the specifications that they asked for. The thing with saving patterns for print is that, for some print on-demand sites for example, you would want your pattern saved as a patterned tile. That will be if your pattern supposed to repeat without any ended dimension. For example, if you would upload it to spoon flour, where you will print it on fabric. But on some print on demand sites, for example, society 6, you will want to save a repeat version of your pattern in a scale that you choose. Let's start with how to save a repeat patterned tile. First off, we will get rid of the objects that are falling off the edges of your tile. So select your background box, hit Command C to copy and Command F to paste in front. Then you select All and hit Command Seven to create a clipping mask or go to Object, Clipping Mask, and Make. When we have our clipping mask, you can change the size of your tile. Let's start with our board. This all depends on where you will use your tile. But let's say that we want this 3,000 pixels wide and high. Then we select our pattern with a clipping mask and change the size to 3,000 pixels wide and high. Arrange your tile to the art board with the align tool. Here we have our tile. Although, at this moment we are only hiding the artwork that are falling off the edges with a clipping mask, so we need to merge this tile. Go to your Pathfinder panel. If you don't see it, go to Window and Pathfinder and then hit Merge. Now you can see that there's nothing falling off the edges of your tile, and you have your finished patterned tile ready to be saved. To make sure that this is repeated without flaws, you can make a copy of your tile, place it to the side and go to object transform and move, and type in 3,000 pixels in the horizontal and zero in vertical, then hit Copy. Select both of your tiles, go to transform and move. Now we type in zero in horizontal and minus 3000, in vertical. Hit Copy and then zoom in. If you don't see any white lines between your tiles, you have a perfectly repeated pattern. To make sure that this pattern tile has the correct size, we do the same steps to bring this into Photoshop and finalize the file as we did in the previous lesson about the print on demand site. We go to Photoshop and create a new document that is 3,000 pixels wide and high and have 300 DPI in resolution. Then we copy our artwork from Illustrator and paste it in Photoshop as a Smart Object, and then we save this as a JPEG. Make sure that you have a large file and baseline optimized, select it and hit Okay. Here you have your patterned tile. They can upload to, for example, spoon flour or any other place where you will want a patterned tile repeated without any end dimensions. The next step is to create a swatch of your repeated pattern in a scale that you wish. Let's create a new document in Photoshop first that is 6,000 pixels wide and high, then we'll head over to illustrated again, and I will create a square that is 6,000 pixels. I'll drag it off my art board and fill it with my pattern. Go to object transforming scheme to scale it as you want it to be. When it comes to this technique to save large sizes swatches of your pattern, you might get a problem with white lines in your pattern. There are a few ways you can try to get rid of the white lines. I found that one technique might work one time, but not the other time. Some say that you can just uncheck the anti alias box in the preferences of illustrator, but that has never worked for me. If I see the white lines in Illustrator or in my saved JPEG file, they will get printed. The first technique to try is to copy your pattern and paste it into Photoshop. Zoom in and check if he got any white lines. In this example, I didn't get white lines with this technique. Let's try the next few techniques. You can try out to create a JPEG by dragging in your artwork to the acid export panel and exported it at JPEG. Then save the third file that we will try, an EPS file. In this case, I would change the size of my artwork to 6,000 pixels and then align my pattern swatch to dartboard. Then I'll save it as an EPS of the pattern swatch. Then we'll head over to Photoshop again to try out the two new different files, the JPEG and EPS. Let's start with the JPEG, zoom in and have a look. I have white lines here as well. Let's try out with EPS. But that didn't work out either. The last thing we will try is to export your artwork in illustrator as a TIF. This one works a lot of times for me, but the reason why you and I might not want to try this out from the start is that, it takes much more capacity from your computer, and sometimes my laptop even freezes when I work with TIF files. Then let us drag in the TIF file in Photoshop and zoom in to see if that worked. This actually looks good. Let's save this file as a JPEG and opening up to zoom in once again to make sure that there's no white lines in your pattern.
13. Thank You: That's all for this class. I hope that you learned something new and had fun watching. Preparing files for print can be so different depending on your purpose. The techniques that I teach you in this class is everything that I'm needed to know to successfully prepare files for print for over five years. I hope that you find that these techniques is essential for your workflow too. Thank you so much for watching. If you liked this class, hit the follow button by my name here below. If you have any questions at all, please ask them on the community page. Feel free to leave a review to let me know if you enjoyed this class. I would love to hear your thoughts. Make sure that you share your class project here in class and if you post it on Instagram, feel free to tag me with @maja_faber. Thanks again for watching.
Maja Faber, Surface Pattern Designer
