Print Production – how to do it right

1. Course Introduction: What will you learn?: I've been working in printing for many years. I had my own print shop in the UK, and I was a production manager for the biggest print shop in North California. I've now been a freelance graphic designer for years on a lot of my work still gets printed . I've even written two books about this stuff, so why should you watch this course and what you're going to get out of it? Well, do you have a print? Anything? Because the most common problem traditionally in the print industry is those on the right colors. And here's an example of what can happen. Lovely shades of blue. Nice, huh? But when you try to print them, this is what happens. That's gonna happen regardless of the kind of printing you're doing. The problem is that the first image I showed you is made of her water. Call RGB colors, and those colors are made of light was this second image is C M y que cyan magenta, yellow on black. On those colors are made of a physical pigment like in Cortona, and they make a much smaller range of color. Now. You can't stop changes like that from happening cause there's no way you can print using light, but you can check for it so you never get caught out. It's really easy. It's part of my work flow on. I'll show you how to do it. If you are getting printing done using plates and ink, which usually means you're printing more than 750 copies, you've got other things to worry about as well things that aren't usually a problem when you're printing digitally. So first I'm gonna very briefly cover how a printing press works just because if you know how something works, it's got to be easy to fix. When there's a problem, right? The printing process boosts contrast at both ends, so highlights tend to pronounce and shadows tend to fill in. And additionally, there's an increase in the mid tones, which is called dot gain. The amount of Dark Game depends on the kind of printing of doing and what kind of paper printing on now. Here's an example of what might happen. Here's a good image. This may be, is how you want it to print. But this is how I would actually print. So the main purpose of this course is to show you how to deal with these problems. Now there are a few other things that you might want to deal with as well. Resolution, for example, which determines the amount of detail visible in an image. What resolution do you need for a particular process? Are there problems increasing on decreasing the signs of an image? And once you got the right number of pixels, what happens to him on the press because of printing press conference pixels? It prints dots. All these questions are answered in the videos. Then we start actually fixing stuff the most of his checked the Levels window in photo shop at some point to make sure there aren't any big gaps in the tone range. So you might see something like this in the guard. Great. This is fine. The tone range goes all the way from black on the left toe, white on the right. There's no gaps. What could possibly go wrong? Well, when you print it, this is gonna happen. It's gonna pick up contrast, and it's gonna go off the scale at either end. Now you can't get blacker than black. You can't get whiter than white on what this means is you're gonna lose that data at the black end. Ital fills in at the white end. It all burns out and you're not going to get it back. And in the middle it picks up the don't gain. So it's a bad situation. And the crazy thing is, it's actually easy to fix. You can use Photoshopped to do with DOT gain. Using the color settings window. You can either pick one of the existing presets or create your own and save it. And if you do that, you can then select it in Adobe Bridge on. That puts it in place for all your adobe graphics app. So they're all using the same color management system. It's called Now, As for the highlights and shadows, we use the Levels window and this this is called the calibration test strip. You can download it if you're watching this course, and I'll show you how to use the two of them together to fix the shadows and the highlights . Absolutely accurately. This is stuff that, in my experience, very few people know about, which is a really shame, because it's the difference between okay printing and great printing. And I'll also show you how to deal with CM Wake a. Images were tragically easy to fix in Grayscale on. Finally, I'll take you through the process of making ah, high rez cm like a PdF and show you how to save your settings so you can use them again any time you want, because the thing about printing is it's expensive, so you want to get it right. 2. What kind of printing do I need?: hi and welcome to my videos on print production. If you're going to be printing something is really two basic ways to go 1st 1 is digital printing, and the second is offset printing. Now, the first part of this course deals with RGB and CM. Wake a color, and this applies to either of these printing methods. Don't think that you don't have to worry if you're doing digital printing that are things you have to be concerned about. Offset printing is more complicated for sure, but the first part of this course, this video, for example, deals with RGB color and digital printing is definitely subject to problems without you becoming. So I'm going to move this out of the Web. It make this one life pretty, isn't it? Nice colors now the top. This says it's RGB. Would you be sense of red, green and blue and red, Green and blue is a simplification of the rainbow, so it really refers to every color under the sun. They're made of light, which is rather different than when you're printing who was then. The colors are made of ink, it's pigment. Those are called reflective colors because the light hits something, and then it bounces back at you. You see the reflected color. In fact, what's happening if you've got a red object? The full rainbow of colors is hitting it. All the colors except for red, are being absorbed, and red is being bounced back at you. And so we look at him, he said. Oh, look that things read. Well, kind of. It's the only color. It's not in a way, but anyway. Now, if you want to print colors like this nice blue at the top. Nice fruit. The bottom Grady. In between them, you got a problem because while these air colors that you can see perfectly well when you print them, No, Now there's a really useful shortcut coming up. So get your pens or pencils ready. What I'm going to do now is control or command. Why, that's how these colors would look if you tried to print them. Not quite as nice heart you see at the top. No, it says. I g b slash eight slash CME like a I'll tell you about the eight later, but the main thing is, it's showing us a preview in C. N. Y. que? No, fortunately we had to do to go back. Is commander control Why? Again? It's an on off toggle. If you want to see something even scarier, try command or control shift. Why? Because then, every pixel that will have to change in order to move from RGB two c m y que goes gray only the colors that don't have to change a tour. Because, of course, all the C M Y que colors are part of RGB as well. You can see them perfectly well, too, so they don't have to move. They don't have to change, but all the RGB colors that have to change to fit into cm wake a go gray. Now again, that's a toggle commander control shift. Why? And there it is again. So this is something that you have to be careful of, even if you doing digital printing. Because digital printing isn't made of light, that's toner. It's like ink. It's actually tiny, tiny, tiny particles of plastic that refused to the surface of the paper. Now there's an interesting thing here. Let's have a look at this image again. If you're doing digital printing, you're probably only doing 750 copies or less because above that, it's more expensive per piece. You can only print on the smooth paper because the toner is fused to the paper and the fusion area. The depth of that is very, very, very, very thin indeed. And if you go very textured paper with peaks and troughs, the toner will be fused, perhaps to the peaks, but not to the troughs. You turn the sheet over and tap it on All that tone of falls off. Not so good. You cannot do any Pantone colors. Special ink mixes. Obviously you can. With offset printing, which uses plates and ink, you can't do any metallic colors, Laser printers and basically, digital printing is done by a sophisticated laser printer. You can't do special ink mixes that go beyond C. M. Y K. You can do metallic inks. You're restricted to cyan, magenta, yellow on black toner. And that's why RGB colors are no good to you. Cost. You've only got running costs. You push the button outcomes. The print was with offset printing. You've got to make the plates first. If you don't have the plates, you can't print, so you gotta make the plates, then you gotta set up the press on. Then you can push the button so there's two levels of costs set up and running. Costs set up is fixed. Whether you're doing one printer, a 1,000,000 running costs are then per piece, and usually things get cheaper of the time. So that's a descending unit of cast was with digital printing. Technically, even though the printer might give you a break on quantity, it's exactly the same process for every sheet that comes off the press. So offset printing is usually much more economical above 750 roughly. You can print on any paper you want, texted or otherwise. You can have panto colors. You can have metallic inks, so, in some cases, air advantages to offset. And if you're only doing 10 copies of something hey Digital, why would you bother to make the plates and set up the press? Hugely expensive for no reason at all. So this is why digital printing has become so popular because a lot of the time we don't want 750 copies. We just want 50 or 100 then digital printing is best, but you've got to be careful with RGB. And I'm going to go into more of the reasons why in the next video. 3. RGB vs. CMYK – what do I need to know?: have any of you have watched any of my videos on color theory, you will have run into this before. But there it was more general here. It's very specific with regards to print. So bear with here, we've got rid. I'm gonna add green to it and you see where they overlap. We've got yellow. No, I'm gonna add blue to that. So red, green and blue. Other three primary colors in terms of visual color because visual colors, um made up of light on what's actually happening is when you look at something red, all the other colors in the spectrum are being absorbed and red is being bounced back to you. In a way, you could say the last thing that object is is red White light from the sun is made up of the visible spectrum, the entire sort of rainbow of colors and red is one of them. Now we're these overlap. You've got cyan, magenta and yellow. Three of the four kind of components of the C m y que process the four color process. The only other one is black not going to go into the print primaries. So the 1st 1 is saying, Then we'll add magenta. Then we'll add yellow on our show You the overlaps between them and, oddly enough, the overlaps between them and now red, green and blue. So there's some interesting relationships between visible and printed color. Now, if you're looking at all these colors in a sort of triangular representation like this, so now we're back to RGB every color. Let's just pretend that can be created with red, green and blue is in here somewhere, well, more or less. But the fact is that towards the center, it's going to start getting a light when you mix more colors together and they're made of light to begin with. Then where they overlap, it gets brighter. And so white light is like red, green and blue, all full on it 100%. Now, if you want to mix yellow with red, green and blue, it's kind of weird. You makes red and green together at 100% and if you want to get magenta, you makes red and blue together at 100% and Scion is red and green at 100%. But because these are called reflective colors, the light hits something, and it's reflected back at you. So they're called reflective colors where they overlap against darker. No que is how printers refer to black. It's the key color. It's the color that tells all the other colors where to go. So hence C m y que. You can't actually mix black with cyan, magenta and yellow. You get a very dark, muddy color, but you won't get black. So in order to get a good representation of deep shadows and edges, we need Black is one of the four inks. No, I'm just gonna sort of bracket him off like this. Let's say that I want to start printing RGB blew that one, and I'm gonna print that with no qualms at all, while unfortunately, as soon as I print it, I'm restricted to the small triangle in the center around the letter K. That is where all the printable colors live. So this shade of blue, which is way outside it is gonna have to move, and the closest possible color that it comes to that it can print. That is what I'm going to get. And that is why the conversion from RGB to see um, way Kay is so drastic because this is happening toe every color in the original that lives outside that little triangle on. The real problem is all images start life in RGB format. They're all made of light. They will be made by light coming through the camera lens or light bouncing up from the lid of the scanner. Even if it's a raw image taken with a fairly sophisticated DSLR, it's still made of light. The colors are still RGB and a lot of them maybe outside that little triangle in the middle and the graphic designer things. Oh yeah, that's OK. It'll just convert on the way through to a pdf. I don't have to worry, and they don't look at the pdf, and they don't see what a disaster all their images have become. Don't let it happen to rule. Number one always always checked the pdf after you've made it 4. Image resolution 1: this video is going to cover quite a bit of ground. It's basically about resolution. So if you've got an image in photo shop, for example, and you're gonna want to print it, it's gotta have a certain number of pixels per linear inch. We don't use inches in the UK, we use centimeters and in the USA will use inches, so it doesn't really matter where you are. The thing is that the global language to describe resolution is dots per inch and dot satchel. Refer to pixels, which is square, so they're not dots to my were thinking, but that's how it is. So if you're putting something on a website, you need 90 60 p. I not 72. 72 is what old Max screens used to be. 96 is what every desktop machine is now. Windows machines have bean 90 60 p i forever. But Max caught up a few years ago, so now all their stop machines have a Resolution 96. So if you want to put an image on a website, you got to save it at the size. You want it to appear at 90 60 p. I Now, if you're gonna do digital printing, you don't need 300 I don't care what anyone's told you. You need 1 50 because there's a point beyond which the human eye does not really need to go . And there's also a point beyond which most laser printers and remember digital printers are sophisticated. Laser printers can't go, so 1 50 dp I again, at the size you want them to appear is all you need for images that are going for digital printing. However, when you get toe offset printing, there's a bit of a problem. You need 300 300 pixels per linear inch, and that's counting from left to right and also opened down. So a square inch well hold 90,000 pixels, which is a lot now. The thing is that every block of four will be used to generate one dot because the printers can print pixels on. They've only got four colors of ink cyan, magenta, yellow on black. And they're going to print dots of different sizes, which obscure the white paper to a greater or lesser degree and give you a darker or a lighter shade of that color. Because the dots is so tiny we don't really see them. They smooched together with a white background that we're looking at. But the printer doesn't print 300 dots two millennia inch on coated paper, which means the ink doesn't soak in and spread like it would if it had blotting paper or newsprint. The eight more or less stays where it's told to go on. The printer uses what's called a line screen of 1 50 dots per linear inch, so that means the dots are arranged on a line there on a vertical and a horizontal grid, and there's 150 of them to the linear inch. Now we'll show you what this means, because this will explain why you need so many more pixels to begin with if you're going for offset printing. So here's a picture of some geranium flowers, and now I've divided it up, and I fix elated it, using a filter called pixel ate mosaic and mosaic sort of averages out areas. You tell it, how many pixels you want to the linear inch. I just divided it like this, so each block of four of these is going to generate one dot in the final print. So I thought, OK, I'll draw a circle on top of a block on. I'll average out the colors in that circle, and here's the result. They can't really see it because the backgrounds turned on. So I'm gonna put a white background in behind it. There you go. There's all the averaged out colors. Now again, the printer cannot print all these colors. The print has gotta make them up with cyan, magenta, yellow and black. So what I did, first of all, to give you an idea of what's happening is I converted each of these colors to the equivalent gray scale, so it resized all of these circles according to the percentage of grey shown inside. Um, so the darker ones stayed bigger. The lighter ones got smaller is the result again? The printer com Print all these shades of gray. The printer uses one color black, and there it is. So that is what an image Let's say a black and white photo has to be reduced to in order to print it. Now, this is clearly very destructive. Each one of those starts represents four pixels. If you started with many fewer pixels they need have far fewer different sizes of dot On, we'd have a much poorer quality image. So to keep the image quality high, we keep the number of pixels high that keeps the number of dots high, and these smooths together with a white background. When we're looking at the image when it's printed and we see shades of gray on, whether is a bigger dot we see a darker shade of gray, and where there's a lighter dot we see a lighter shade of gray. Okay, now onto the next thing. How does the printed deal with the different colors of dance? Because if the printer ports in, for example, a magenta screen and then a scion screen at the wrong angle, you get this. This is called a Marais Patton, and it happens when the dots of one color gradually coincide of the dots of another on, gradually move away from them again and then gradually coincide of them again. And it's like somebody stretched a net over your image so we don't want that, and I've got a light gray screen in the background, and over here I'm showing different angles for different screens. So let's say you put down a black screen and the lines are vertical and horizontal. Okay, you've got to put the next color down at 30 degrees away from it, or else you're going to get him a Ray Patton and then the next color goes 30 degrees away from that. But the third color would be back or you started zero and 90. That's the orientation of the lines of dots, so we can't use 0 30 60 and 90. It just won't work, so we have to do something different. We start with black at 45 degrees, not zero and 90 on. There's a good reason for that. Our world is filled with horizontal and vertical objects, and if we put the black screen at zero and 90 we would be inclined to see those rows of dots much more easily then, if we park them at 45 degrees. So if you look at any black and white image that's being printed, you'll find that the dot Patton is 45 degrees. Then Scion goes in 30 degrees away from that, um, agenda goes in 30 degrees away from Scion and yellow. Yellow is kind of special yellow goes in it zero and 90 because it's the least visible color. If I didn't have black on magenta and cyan that from a distance just looks like a pale yellow square. But in fact, the dots on it are exactly the same size and shape as these, which are infinitely more visible because they obscure the paper quite well, if that was translated into a shade of gray to be quite dark, or is it? The yellow is translated into a shade of gray. It would hardly be differentiated from the paper, so yellow is the least visible color, so it gets put in at the most visible angle. And it always creates a Marais Patton. But we can't see it. And that's the only reason that four color printing works. There are no additional angles. Any additional colors or so we thought you could use green and orange as well, because green is the opposite of magenta. On orange is the opposite of Scion, and you're never gonna need green and magenta together overlapping because they'd cancel each other out to gray on. The same applies for orange and scion so you can have green where you're not using magenta and you can use exactly the same screen angle as magenta users. And orange can use the same screen angle that Scion uses. And now you got six color process printing and it's coming, but it's not here yet. 5. Image resolution 2: resolution is a very important issue because the number of pixels determines the amount of data, the amount of detail visible in your image, and you need different amounts for different processes. If you're gonna put an image on a website, don't use 72. It's 96 dots per inch because on most desktop machines, the browser displays at 96 dp I That's the resolution of most desktop screens, So that's the first number. Forget 72. That's old. If you're sending something off a digital printing, you need 150 dots per inch, not 300. You don't need 300. Don't bother to tell them. Just say Oh yea and then use 1 50 Your images will only be 1/4 of the size. They would be a 300. If you're doing offset printing, you do need 300. No question, because it's a very destructive process. You need a lot more data to begin with. Now, if you want to change the resolution in an image or the size of image, this is how you do it in Adobe Photoshopped, you make your image active. First of all, then you go image image size on this window pretty much tells you what you need to know. You got the within the height in a variety of different measurements. You can choose whichever one you want, and if they're links on this icon zone, you can uncheck it. But if that's linked, it means these two are kept proportional. So if I change this to say 40 you can see that the height changed to keep it proportional to the original. Now here's resolution. At the moment it's separate, so I could change that number and these wouldn't change, which could be a problem. But if I wanted to find out. Okay, I've got my image. It's this wide. It's this tool at 72 dp I What's it going to be? At 300? I would unchecked re sample that links all of these together. Then I could highlight that and put in 300 on. That tells me what the size of my image will be at 300 dp I and it's pretty small now. If I wanted it to be 20 centimeters y it at 300 dp I So I'm gonna uncheck that now and put in 20 if I clicked. Okay. All I'm doing is throwing a whole lot more pixels at this image. I'm not generating any more detail. There are different methods down here for enlarging or reducing an image. There are two for enlargement preserved details by cubic. Smoother. There's want reduction as well. It's not so important. You can reduce an image really, without losing much in the way of detail. It will cut down the number of pixels. But, hey, you're reducing the image. Of course it's going to. But if you want to enlarge it, you could either use one of these in photo shop. Or you could use 1/3 party treatment to do it instead. No, I've got a few examples here that I'll show you. So I'm gonna close this down on are going to close this. This is just a nen large mint of that image. By the way, I'm going to close this toe now. Here is my original image on the right at 72 d p. I and I've taken that and I've enlarged it three different ways On the left. This is an enlargement using by cubic smoother. This is an enlargement using preserved details on this is an enlargement using on one resize, which is third parties stuff. Now all of them have done a reasonable job. The JAG is a no longer apparent, but preserve detail has added a whole bunch of contrast, which I don't want on by cubic Smoother has softened everything which I don't want. But this one on one resize has actually done a remarkable job. Now the better the images coming in, the better the results going to be a known one say that you can resize an image up to 1000% of the original and get away with it. No, I've used it a lot. I've never actually taken it up to 1000 but I've used it between 305 100 many times no one has ever noticed. So if you need to enlarge an image, I really recommend that you use on one software. No, I've got a screenshot here that I'll show you. So there is the address on one dot com products. Resize. The website really doesn't do very much. It doesn't really tell you what it's capable of at the moment they got a sale on its $40 for the whole thing, so it's gonna pay for itself first time through, and you can either install it so it acts as a standalone program. You can run by itself or it runs within photo shop so you can open an image in photo shop flavor with a 11 resize it straight back into Photoshopped. Do whatever else you want to save it. Wonderful. Now the other thing that you need to worry about is, can you trust your monitor on? The answer is probably not. It might be reasonably good. They're all reasonably good. But is it accurate? Are you actually seeing the colors you're going to get when you print it? And if you're not sure, I've got another piece of kit here that I've taken a screen shot off and it's called a spider data color. There is the address https spider dot data color dot com. This piece of kit, which does not cost $40 It is a bit more hangs in the front of your monitor on the software that comes with it projects colors, which it reads on. It really doesn't take long, and it will then give you a choice before and after. I guarantee you're gonna likely after a whole lot more. You will not believe the difference. And you will then know that what you're looking at is accurate. And this is good, whether your professional photographer or just starting out in graphics and you can do it on every computer in the room, on the all look, the same well worth it. And I'm not getting paid a penny for advertising. Either of these. I just think they're really good and that you deserve to know about them. 6. How an Offset Press works: For those of you who didn't know exactly what happens on an offset press, I thought I'd show you because it's helpful. I have always found to have background information. Doesn't matter what it is. If you've got some sort of background information, it's like it gives you ground to stand on. So I've never regretted having a little bit of background information. So even if you never gonna set foot in a print shop, this will help you understand what you need to do in order to make something ready for Brent At the top, you've got a thing called the Inc unit. There's a trough filled with ink, and there's a roller sitting in it, turning fairly slowly so it's covered in IQ. And then there's another roller that jumps and touches it and jumps back again. When it jumps back again, it comes into contact with a whole bunch of little rollers. Now this is quite a complex set up. It's a lot more complex than this. Very often, some of them are isolate from side to side as well. Their job is to flatten the encounter into a very thin, even layer, the full width of the press, and sometimes at more than one point, they come into contact with the plate cylinder, which is rotating clockwise. Now the plate senator has got a sheet of aluminum anchored to it, and the image on the plate attracts. Oil on the background on the plate attracts water, but you know, if something's dry, oil will stick to it no matter what. So before the plate hits the ink rollers, there's a thing called the damping unit. There's a truck filled with a pH balance solution, and sitting in that and rotating slowly is a roller covered by kind of a sock. And that's in contact with another roller, which is in turn in contact with the plate cylinder. And so it's transferring a minute amount of moisture to the plate all the time. That, incidentally, means that there's a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of moisture transferred to the paper. Eventually, on what happens to paper when it gets stamped, it changes shape anyway. The plate hits the damping unit. First, water is stuck to the background. It then hits the Inc unit. Ink is applied to the image round it comes, and it meets the blanket cylinder. Now that's one of the points of contact where the image is transferred in an analog rather than a digital way. The blanket cylinder is covered with a sort of canvasback rubber sheet that's pulled tight and the image transfer to it. The blanket goes round and comes into contact with the impression cylinder and those to push against each other really tight, which means when the paper goes through between them, the paper can't slip around on the blanket, transfers the image to the paper. The paper continues through hits, a stop falls onto a trolley. And that's it. Except that when the blanket senator transfers the image of the paper, that is a second analog transfer. No, Any time you've got a digital transfer, it's perfect. It can go back and forth 100 times, and there'll be no change in the data whatsoever. But any time you do an analog transfer, you lose data. Something happens. The data changes slightly, and in this case the data picks up contrast, which means you're gonna burn out the highlights and fill in the shadows, and it also picks up density at the mid point, which is the dot game That's why all this stuff happens anyway. That's how an offset press works. It's a very similar process, whether it's a sheet fed press, as I've shown here or a Web press. The only difference on the Web press is it's much more complicated. And as the paper goes through under the blanket cylinder, it doesn't just me to stop. It meets a rotating blade, which she eats it on. The sheets has sent out to the various voting of collating stations, and sometimes an entire magazine is created and packed into cartons and put on a pallet unwrapped, and nobody's laid a finger on it. 7. Dot Gain explained...: now, the other thing that you've got to deal with if you're printing, especially if you're printing offset this time is a single dot gain. You really don't have to worry about that on digital printing. It's absolutely negligible, but an offset printing. You do have to worry because there's a couple of different places where there's a physical transfer of the image in order to get it onto the paper on what happens is the midpoint picks up density. No fear printing on what's called a sheet fed press, where your printing junk Junker junket and each chunga is a sheet coming off the press, the mid points going to increase in density by about 10% on the result is, if you expected this to come off the press, what you'd actually get is something more like this. Now, if you're printing on a Web press and Web press means it's not sheets, it's a continuous roll of paper. It goes like a jet. The ink is a different formula. It's much more liquid than the mid points, more likely to increase in density by about 20% which means now your image look something more like this and you've got to compensate for it on the way you compensate for it is with a thing called a color management system A C N s. That can be a little bit tricky, but there's ways of making it work properly. So I show you how to do that. But before I do that, let me just show you something else. I've got two coffees of this image in the background here. This one on the left is RGB. This one the right is C m y que the both identical. The reason they're identical is the RGB image is an exact copy off the c n y que image. And as I already explained, all the colors in C n y que are also part of the RGB color space. So when I make a copy and converted to RGB, nothing changes. However, channels are the color components of each of these images and in the sea Um, way kay image. There are four. There's san, magenta, yellow and black, as you would expect on each channel holds all the information for that color. Now if I click on Scion, that's all the scion in the image. Well, you couldn't really use that as an image, could you? Looks kind of weird. And sodas, magenta and sodas, yellow and black looks probably the worst of the lot. Okay, How about the RGB image? We've got red, green and blue. Three channels on the Red Channel is not bad. And the Green Channel, it's not bad on the Blue Channel isn't bad. And you could say, Well, this is the morning shot. The green Channel is the afternoon shot, the red channels, the evening shot. I could take any one of those and I could tweak it a little more. You can open up levels. You can drag the sliders around. You can change each channel. I could save it and save that channel out as a single grayscale image. You can't do that with C m y que Anyway, in the next video, we're going to start looking kind of management and how to deal with it because it can be a real headache on. I usually think of it as the tools of genius put into the hands of fools And where the fools 8. The 'Color Settings' window: So where do you find the color management system that's in place for this particular image ? On what is it? It's a digital tag. When you save the image, it's gonna be saved with it. No, In fact, it's attached to the image as soon as you open it. And that's why you sometimes get warnings when you're opening images and Photoshopped or opening documents in Adobe in design, saying that there's something wrong when maybe you're not quite sure that's about what? Actually, it points to CMS stuff. What it's saying is that the tag that's attached to the document of the images you're trying to open is different. So the one you've got resident in the program where you're trying to open it if I want to find out what that tag is in photo shop, I go to the edit menu and they go down to color settings on. That tells me what's in place. No, the top here, it says custom. I'm going to click on this for a second and choose Europe repressor. You now ignore the one that says bad idea. Ignore the one that says stupid down the bottom, these ones that I've added, to show people how not to do it, I'm going to choose Europe pre press three that will be on the list. When I do that, it puts all those settings into place. Now the important ones are up here. But there's also so interesting ones down here. If there's a mismatch, if the profiles are different, it's gonna ask you when you opened the image, it will also ask you if you're trying to paste something in. And if there's a missing profile, it'll ask you when you open these air a good idea. These allow you to sort things out right at the start. Then up here, we've got C M Y que Profiles and RGB profiles. No, not bothered about the RGB profiles right now because this is testing for print. So the C and y que profiles of the ones that I want to worry about and this one coated fogger, 39 is a good place to start. Unfortunately, the one that had to be put in place is US Web coded swap V two, which is fine. If you're printing stuff that requires a Web breast, it's not so good for sheet fed stuff, whether you live in the USA or in Europe. This is a good profile used for sheet fed stuff. You can refine it further. For example, this says is a dot gain of 15% built in. Okay, so how about if I Joes instead of that custom c M Y k. So I could put in my own? This is the adobe standard. That's not what I want. So I'm gonna choose down here. Ah, you're a standard coated on that gives me a 9% dark game value, and the method that it's going to use for something special is called GCR. Now that stands for great component replacement, and it's doing it at a medium level. It's down here. Great component replacement means that gradually, as the density of pixels increases, black is going to start to replace cyan, magenta and yellow. Because if it doesn't, there's a danger that you're gonna exceed what's called the ink limit. And that means basically, there's too much wetting already on the sheet for anymore. Wetting to stick. Now you've got a potential of 300% with cyan, magenta and yellow at 100%. Each was with black. You've only got 100% to worry about. So if it gets to the danger zone, black takes over completely, and cyan, magenta and yellow are out of the picture. And from that point on and the pixels the so dense you can tell anyway, they're just black. There's only blacking in them now. If you choose UCR instead, this is called under color removal. It's only applicable in really, really dense shadows on. I don't use it as a sort of a general CMS application. I stick with GCR. It's much more effective than most of the things I want to worry about. No, I can set my own dot gain level here. How do I figure that out? Don't worry, I'll show you even better. There's a resource uploaded with that video that you can download and use for yourself. So the idea here is that you can put in whatever you want and then click OK, and there it is, and then I could save it, which means I can apply to other jobs. I could put it in place as a sort of background condom management for all of my Adobe graphics software in design, illustrative photo shop, things like that, things that I might print from It's well worth doing. But a word of warning if you mess around with the CMS is if you start to put your own ones in place, it is absolutely vital that you talked to the printer and tell them what you've done. Who was. Most printers assume that we don't know about this stuff on the We're gonna send all I work in where the Adobe standard put in place and they're going to fix it. Unfortunately, the way they fix it is usually by throwing Mawr Inc at it, so I'll get into all this later. But you've got to tell the printer what you've done otherwise they're going to ruin the job for you. 9. Fixing Shadows and Highlights: So in order to find out what the dot gains actually gonna be on what, you want a print? I figured out a way of cheating. You find out beforehand this strip of information that you can see up here is a little illustrated document that I made quite a few years ago. Now an illustrator, you can tell it not to color. Manage what you're doing so that it doesn't twist any of the data that you put in there on what I did, an illustrator was I filled this first square with 1% black tent. The second with two of the third with three. The fourth with four and so on. Then I put a 50% into the middle and then have another Siri's going from 90% all the way up to 99. No, I just opened up the info window on the in for window is really handy, as you'll see, because up here in the top left quadrant, it just records grayscale values. And that's what I'm interested here. This is a grayscale image. I'm not interested in CM wake a values. The thing is that I'm here in photo shop. I've got a color management system in place. You've seen it 9% dot gain. It's already affecting this image, even though it won't affect how it looks on the screen. It's affecting how it would be saved. So if I try and find out what the 1% daughter is now, it says, Yeah, 1%. Okay, on, then the 2% square is too on the 3% is three. Okay, but the 4% is also three on the 5% is for. Then we got five 66 again. Seven. Okay, this is not quite right, is it? How mother, 50% Tent 40. It's compensating for what's gonna happen to it when it goes through the press. It's artificially holding the tone level back so that when it goes to the press, it's going to come back up to 50 and I'll be happy. So you don't want to open this in photo shop and save it there because you cannot apply no color management system in photo shop, you'll be doing something to it. If you download this strip from the notes of the course, you'll get a pure, unadulterated original illustrator image. Now the idea is you send it to the printer. It's a pdf you send in a pdf. You say If you've got another job running on similar paper on a similar presto, the one that you're going to run my job on, would you please run this in the gutter? You know what's going to be cut off and thrown away. By the way, the original is nothing like this big. These squares about 2.5 millimeters across on. That's enough for a printer to read them with a thing called a dense it ometer, which is a device about the size of a mouse. And it's got little window. They put it down on top of the square they're trying to read, and it gives them a density reading. So you ask them to send you some of the press sheets from the middle of the run. That's when everything's going well. It's not the beginning of the run where they're setting up the levels. It's not the end where the print is probably watching the clock on the wall and hoping it was time to go home soon. Middle of the run Everything's cooking along nicely. Ask them to send you a few press sheets from there and also asked them to get the printer to read the density of the midpoint. Dark because you don't have a dancer. Tahmeena. But they do. And whatever they tell you that DOT reads the difference between 50% on whatever number they tell you is the dot gain on that press. So if they tell you Oh, it's 61 you've got 11% dark game. If he tell you it's 56 you've got 6% dot gain. Then, with the chutes that you get back from the printer, get a magnifying glass and look at these squares and the first several are going to be completely white. Then maybe around 5%. You got a few little dots here and there. On on 6% you've got a reasonable sprinkling of darts of bravery tiny. Whether there in that case, you know that anything lower than a 6% shade of gray is just gonna burn out toe white. So you were then calibrates or the brightest thing in the image is a 6% shade of great. I'm going to show you how to do this But remember that six. Then you look at the other end of the scale. Now, here you've got white dots on an inky background. So again you'll find that the last few of filled in completely. Maybe there's a sprinkling of white dots on the 95% dot. So then again, you know, anything darker than 95 is just gonna fill into black. But if the darkest thing in your image is 95% black, you know that that's going to expand out to 100. The other is going to go back out to zero, and all the tone in your image is going to be represented and visible, and you're gonna have a superb Brent because you've not only taking care of the DOT gain in the middle. You've taken care of the highlights and shadows as well, and very few people do that. But now you can 10. Making your own Color Management file: So now I'm gonna make and save a color profile. Then I'm going to set it in place, and then we're going to come back and calibrate this image according to that profile. So the first thing I'll do is go to edit kind of settings, and I still got in place Coated Father 39 which is fine, but I'm going to go to custom and I don't want this. So let's have a look. See what we confined. How about euro standard coated and that gives me 9% dot gain using great component replacement at a medium level. That's okay. I'm gonna say I'm gonna have 11% dark game, which means I got the test strip back from the printer. They read the midpoint for me, and they've told me that the density the midpoint is 61% and it was originally fifties. And I know that the difference between the two is 11. So 11% not going to say okay to that. And this is what I've got now. Euro stand coated 11% GCR medium. Okay, Now I'm going to save that save. This is the folder where all of your settings will be saved. See, I've got the two year that I did before. Bad idea. Stupid. Okay. I'm gonna call this one far gra 39 11 dot gain. That's what I need for 39 11 dot game. OK, now I'm going to save it. And now it wants me to type a description that's going to show up in bridge? No. Show you that in a 2nd 1st of all, I just type This is the CMS had just created that's going to show up in bridge. Okay. No, I'm done here. Now I'm going to go to Bridge and here in bridge, I'm gonna open kind of settings. Now, here the color settings panel applies to all of your adobe software and I can scroll down through here. Look at that fog or a 39 11 dot gain. This is the CMS I just created. There it is. Now. If I click that to select it, then I click. Apply now. I'm going to go back in just to show you now it says it's synchronized. That means that this setting just got put in place in in design, photo shop and illustrator. I'm gonna cancel out of here and I'll show you his illustrator. There's the test strip while I'm here. I'll just show you that under the edit menu, you can go down to a sign profile and decide not to kind of manage this document. You can't do that. And in design you can't do it in photo shop, but you can do it in Illustrator, So I'm gonna cancel out of that. Don't going to Goto Edit color settings Fokker 39 11 dot gain synchronized Let's have a look in in design and It kind of settings Fugro 39 11 dot gain synchronized This is looking good. Now I'm going to go to photo shop. This is where I created it. Edit kind of settings. Favre 39 11 dot game Fantastic. So now everything is singing from the same sheet. And even better, if I go into in design and make a PdF, I could apply the same settings in the pdf. So everything gets consistent kind of management settings applied to it right the way through. Now, some people have the idea that you don't need to do this. You can just apply them when you make the pdf. No. What about all the stuff you've built into the pdf? The stuff you made an illustrator, the images you saved in photo shop on the layout. You've made an in design. All of those should have the same kind of management system applied to them as well. Otherwise, you may get some unpleasant surprises. 11. Taking Care of the 'Ink Limit': I pointed out the inclement earlier on when I showed you color settings in photo shop, and I mentioned that if you exceed the end limit, it means that ink stays on the press. The press is incapable of adding more into the amount of wetting that's already on the paper now in photo shop, it's never gonna let an image exceed the ink limit. Nor is it ever gonna let the shadows get so heavy that you run into problems. Furnish up takes care of all the deep shadows for you without you having to do anything. You do have to worry about the dot gain in the middle. You do have to worry about highlights burning out, but you don't have to worry about shadows in in design you do. Here's the image that I'm going to be working within Photoshopped, and here's a color that I've created Now This color, if I go to swatches, is 93. Scion 75 magenta, no yellow, no black. It's a pretty strong color, just under 100 and 70% Total Inc So you have to think in terms of total link totaling to see um, way Kay is 400. Okay, now I'm going to select that shape, and I'm going to set it toe over print of Phil, so that means that this is going to show through it. We're going to see now a combination of this printed over the top of the image. It's not knocking the image out of the way, which would normally be the case if I uncheck over print Phil. Now this shape is deleting the image from underneath it. It's blank paper so that it can print the blue color without the image getting in the way. But if you said it toe over print, both objects will exist in the same place at the same time. Now I'm going to go instead of two separations to the inclement, and the ink limit is currently set to 280% combined ink density, and all of these red areas are areas where I'm exceeding 280%. No, that's actually the lowest percentage this is going to give you. So to 80 is where Adobe considers you're going to start having problems. If I put that to 3 40 job done, problem goes away. Unfortunately, it didn't go away. I've just said don't bother to tell me any problem Areas below a combined ing density of 340% you're not gonna find Press is able to give you 340% unless it got drying units mounted between the ink units. So 280 is really the danger level. Now that tells me I cannot possibly over print this shape onto this image, even if I thought the effect of it is kind of nice. No, it won't let me do it. I shouldn't do it, and I'll be in trouble if I do. 12. Image Calibration: Grayscale: So now I'm going to calibrate this image. I've looked at the press sheets that I've got back from the printer on the calibration test strip told me that anything darker than 96% gray is gonna fill in completely and anything lighter than 6% gray is gonna burn out completely. So I've got to restrict the tone range of this image to 95% dark to 6% light. Right now it goes all the way from ah, 100 to 0. And I know that because if I open up the levels window with control command l that hissed a gram tells me there's a pile of data go all the way from the black point on the left to the white point on the right. I mentioned earlier that I would talk about this. Ate up here at the top eight, stands for eight bit, one bit would be to states the pixel could be on or are thick of the white or black. That's one bit deep. Eight bits is to to the Eighth States two times two times two times two times two times two times two times two, which is 256. So imagine here We've got 256 vertical slots into which someone has dropped chips to give us a representation of how many pixels there are of each shade of gray. So we've got black at one end. Why did the other 254 shades of gray in between them? And that's enough? You don't need more than that for most grayscale images. Very rarely do you meet an image where you need more than that. So now I've got to do is figure out what's the darkest thing in my image. What's the lightest thing and push the dark thing to 95 on the light thing to six? Well, I can see light things in the image, and I can see dark things, but I can't tell what they are unless I open up the threshold window. No, I'm going to cancel out of levels because it stops you from being able to do other stuff on . I'm going to go to image adjustments threshold. Same hissed a gram, but only one slider that's right in the middle. Everything till the left of it shows is black. Everything to the right of it shows his white. I'm also going to go to the window info. No. If I can sell out to the threshold for a second and go to the options button, you see that you can tell under panel options what you want. The first color readout and the second gallery doubt to be on the first color readouts set to gray scale and the 2nd 1 set to see um, way Kay. So there's my grayscale readout. There's my CEO, Mike. A readout. I'm not gonna bother with CM Wake A because this is a grayscale image. But what this means is, if I put the cursor over the image, it tells me the exact K value grayscale value of the pixel underneath. As a percentage, it doesn't try to confuse me with where that shade is. On a scale of 0 to 2 55 It gives me a good old percentage, which is great. Before he opened up threshold, I'm going to go to the eyedropper and choose colors sampler tool. Then I'm going to open up threshold image adjustments threshold. I want to find the darkest thing first, so I drag the slider all the way to the left. Anything that's still showing is guaranteed to be 100%. I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to cancel threshold. I don't have the image to stay looking like this if I put the cursor over anywhere in that area. The K value in the top left quadrant of the info panel says 100. And if I click, I put down a marker. Now that Mark is going to give me before and after information as I changed the values. So now let's zoom out again, Commander Control zero and I'll open up threshold again. Image adjustments, threshold. And this time we're going to the right all the way, and that is clearly white. So again I'm going to cancel out a threshold. And I put the cursor right about there and the cave and he says, zero click done it. I've got one market, 100 1 market zero. I'll zoom out again now, but in fact I don't even need to look at the image any more. I could do this entirely by the numbers. Okay, Now I'm going to open up levels again and watch what happens to this number The second number if I drag the left hand slider slightly to the right 96. Perfect. Now watch what happens to this number if I drag the right and slider slightly to the left on. What I've just done is squished the hissed a gram so that the darkest pixels in the image will be 96% and the brightest things will be 6%. No, I okay that and then open up levels again. You'll be able to see a gap at each end of the tone range. I'll cancel out of that now. You probably didn't notice, but the images very slightly flatter now than it was before. If I undo that with Commander Controls Ed, did you see the image very slightly brighten up of it, not going to redo that command or control, shift said. So what this means is, when that goes through the print process, the dark pixels will gradually pick up contrast and edge their way out to 100%. The bright pixels will also slightly pick up contrast an edge their way back up to zero on the midpoint in the middle, the dot gain is taken care of by the color management system I've got in place. So that's how you do grayscale calibration. Nothing to it. You can put down up to 10 Marcus with a color sample, a tool on a grayscale image. You don't really need mawr than just one in the highlights in the shadows, but if you're doing a C M y que image, you really need one in the highlight areas for each of the colors, and we'll look at doing that next. 13. Image Calibration: CMYK: How about if you want to do the same thing with CM like a, it's the same kind of process. Really. I'm unlikely to get zero with all of these, I might, but I don't know. Now I can choose which channel I want to work with. So I'm going to go to channels and I'll choose the Scion Channel first, then a low pain threshold, and I'll drag the slider all the way to the right. Remember, you don't have to worry about the shadows. Photo shoot will take care of those for you. Now if I drag this side of very slightly to the left again, I think probably this is my best shot. There's very little of it, but there's a little bit. So I'm going to cancel that and then I'll come back and I'll put the cursor about there and let's see, you got 43 two. I'll click on to now. If you want, you can move these around. I'll do another one. You can drag them around to everyone going to be, And if you decide you've got one and you don't want it, hold on the old key. Put the cursor on top of it. Little pair of scissors appears Click and its history anyway, that's the Scion Channel. Not gonna zoom out again Now choose the Magenta Channel back into threshold once more again dragged the side of all the way to the right. Well, that's going to be easier. So I think this area here, I should be able to find zero in there. Cancel. Put the cursor over it. Yeah, I've got zero. Then I'll choose the Yellow Channel and again go back into threshold, drag the slider to the right, and I've got a little bit up here. Probably. There's a zero amongst that lot. Cancel zero. Zoom out again. Select the Black Channel threshold. Drag the slider all the way to the right. Plenty. That should be easy to find. Cancel zero. Okay, so now I've got Marcus in place that show me as close to zero as I can get for all of the four colors. Now, if I open up levels again, I can choose the Composite Channel or the individual channels, and I'll drag this out of the way so that I can see the markers. If I dragged the light end of the output levels in Watch what happens to Cyan here, Magenta here, Yellow here on black here. They all start to increase in density. No, If I knew that the brightest thing in the image has got to be 6% at the moment, none of them are going to make it. But I could drag this in until the others don't quite make it, but they'll soon catch up. A few percentage is darker and they'll be there, okay. And no, I know that there's not gonna be a single empty pixel in this image when it prints, because that area of empty pixels sometimes looks like ah, hole. And it's not a good idea. You really, ideally want to have Connor in every pixel in the image. Or it might look like a mistake. That's how you do it. You don't have to delete thes markers. You could leave them in place. You may have to print that image somewhere else in another print, shop on another press on different paper, and you'll get a different dot gain reading and a different shadow and highlight reading when you send them the test strip. So you might want to keep those markers in place. They don't show up when the job prints. They're just going to save you some time later on. 14. Making a Hi-Res PDF: So once you finished with all the calibration stuff in photo shop, then possibly you're going to bring the images into a document. You're creating an in design, and if you're creating a document in in design at the end of the process, you want to make a PdF. Now I'm assuming you're gonna want to make a PdF to send out to a print shop a commercial print shop, in which case it's got to be seeing like a It's got to be high res. You know everything's got to be done, because once you send it off, you can't do anything to it. And print is very rarely one in design files thes days, because that would mean that have to support in design. In house. They don't have a license, somebody capable of using it all very expensive. So they'd much rather you had to deal with all of that stuff and just send in a pdf. The problem is, if there's a mistake, guess who it belongs to on their very rarely going to check it. Mostly, they're just going to say thank you. We'll let you know when it's printed, and then you have to go away and bite your nails for a few days, so I'm just going to show you how to do it with a couple of tweaks along the way. And at the end of this process, you can save it as your very own preset, which you can use in the future. And you don't wanna have to recreate the wheel every time you make a PdF. So first of all, it's important your document is in a saved state, which means there's no little asterisk showing up here next to its name. If there's an asterisk, it's not saved. And if you make a PdF, while it's in an unsafe state and everything crashes, you may have corrupted your in design file, which means you're in trouble once you've saved it, then you go to file export and you want to choose Adobe. Pdf print, not Adobe. PDF Interactive Adobe pdf print. Give it a name, then you click. Save Never, ever use high quality print for a commercial print job. This is a good preset for digital printing because it won't bother to convert images to see um, way Kay. It'll just let your laser print to do it. So you don't want this. You want either. Pdf x one A or press quality. Now these others down here that have no square bracket around the name, the ones that I've created myself, you could see some of them obviously a really good instead of high quality print I'm going to select. Pdf x one, a pdf x one A is a good preset because it does a very good job with things like overlapping , transparent areas. Drop shouters with fuzzy edges, things like that delicate stuff. Now there's a couple of things I'm gonna want to do to this. But this page basically says, I'm going to export his pages now. That's usually my preference. Even if I'm out putting a booklet, I'll do. It is individual pages because sometimes it's easier for the printer. You might want to check with the printer and ask view. Pdf After exporting great idea, I don't have to go look for it. Nothing else in him matters don't change. You don't change layout, then go to compression. Now Automatic J peg. Maximum quality is a good setting, but you don't need this second number to be any higher than 300. If you leave it open a higher number, your pdf may be much bigger than it needs to be in. If it's bigger, it becomes unwieldy. It's more like the crash and so on this number. Also the grayscale images. This could be 300 on this number. Food monochrome, Which means bet map, which means one bit deep. Pixels are on or off, so the white or black there's no shades of gray. You do need much high resolution because this resolution number this is nothing to do with a resolution of your images. This is the resolution of the output. So the little blips of information that make up everything in your document are going to be a 1200 of an inch wide, which means plenty of different sizes of dots. Nice, smooth tax. Everything's good. Crop image data. The frames. Good idea. C C I T T group for is a non lossy form of compression Used to text online up. Great. Now we're going to marks and bleeds. Just check all printers marks and then check Hughes Document bleed include slug area. Even if you didn't have one on a document. If you checked use document lead include slug and your document has a bleeder. A slug. It'll include them so there's no harm. Including that in the preset that you're gonna save. Then go to output. This is going to convert all the images to the destination profile Witches coated fogger 39 which is the one that you put in place in bridge. Cool, advanced. Don't change anything on this page. This 100% means every character in every front that you use in your document will be included. Don't change transparency, flattener security. You cannot password protect PD effects on a documents summary. No one ever reads it. It's just a record of what we just did. We don't have to read it either. If you want, you can click on save preset. Give it a name that makes sense to you when you click. OK, it will show up on this. Drop down this to the top from that point on, and it won't have square brackets around it. And you can see that I've used this before to illustrate what not to do. And then once you're finished with all that, you click on export and that's it you've got color bars for the printed to check the color levels. During the printing, you got registration marks. This document didn't have any bleed, so it didn't bother with a bleed Trim on. That's all there is to it. Which means that you don't have to wake up at three in the morning biting your nails and wondering what the heck is gonna happen to print job.