• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

Printing Formats

Sublime

New Member
Hey guys,

Just a quick question on printing formats.
What do you prefer?
•PDF
•TIFF
•Jpg
•EPS

And do you send to the rip via Photoshop/corel/illustrator or from Indesign?

Cheers
 

zmatalucci

New Member
•PDF- eh, have had a lot of problems w/ masks in my rips for some reason
•TIFF- only at high dpi, at least 72dpi at final size
•Jpg- only at high dpi, at least 72dpi at final size
•EPS- Yes, I love vectors. Please don't put a low res .jpeg etc. inside of it and call it a vector file either.
 

Letterbox Mike

New Member
from customers who supply their own art, .pdf is preferable although we rasterize it as a .tiff. We have alot of problems RIPing .pdfs, tons of transparency and color issues. There are so many ways to save a pdf that it's impossible to get a good file much of the time. But if it looks good on screen it'll rasterize and print great.
 

bob

It's better to have two hands than one glove.
PDF's can have some nasty color shifts. Especially with greens.

TIF's are generally overkill. A hell of a lot of space for a minuscule improvement over a JPG with 0 compression and smoothing.

EPS if and only if a vector image is needed.

In general, the best all around performance, assuming you have your environment set up properly, is an RGB JPG. The only caveat is that gradients may show some weird banding. You can mitigate this by jacking up your dither algorithm to whatever is the highest performance dither in whatever software you might be using.
 
Top