Saturday, June 4, 2011

Business card printing Spain

By Cherry Viv


There are a few printers and printing specialists such as cheap-printing-spain.com who cater for international clients. With English-speaking printers in Spain it is more likely to get the most cost-effective materials and print processes as nothing is lost in translation.

In today's climate it is more important than ever to expect value for money in your printing. Printing in Spain is no different. On the contrary, the opportunity to obtain bargain-priced printed artwork is greater with targeted and healthily populated expatriate regions. With printers who cater for specific populations, it is easy to fill printing plates with several customers requiring similar print runs to lower the initial setup costs. It is normal that these savings are then moved to the client resulting in lower prices. For example, a local printer in Costa Blanca on the run up to St. Patrick's Day may have one or two printing plates all filled with Promotional printing advertising several different bars and restaurants. So for the cost of one printing plate, the printer will make four or five jobs. This then can force the price of printing down to accommodate the requirement.

It is often confused that poor printed output is the fault of the printer. Sometimes this is the case with issues such as colour registration or of course, lack of quality control, but more often than not it is down to the resolution and colour levels of the original image. It is important to oversee and adjust accordingly your final print file before sending your final designs to be printed by your print outlet. Here is a list of some of the most common techniques to bear in mind which if ignored or done incorrectly, result in a less than average printed output.

If you want your finished artwork to have the final size of A5, for example, and you wanted a part of your image to be printed right up to the paper then the file that you should give to the printers should include crop marks showing the A5 image. It is therefore necessary to run the image beyond the crop marks so that a portion of the image is sliced of post press. Some printers will require different bleed distances but it is quite normal and acceptable to supply a 3mm bleed.

Image resolution is probably the number one offender when sending files to be printed in Spain. Lots of due to problems in communication or lower-rate, lower profit margins, will simply print what is sent irrespective of bleeds, resolution or colour balance etc. So it's generally up to you check this to be correct. Resolution is something that can be very confusing, even to industry professionals. Basically your great screen image doesn't necessarily mean it will look good on paper. Screen resolution on your monitor is 72 dots per inch and printed media at press quality is printed at 300 dpi. This is because colours are made from a combination of four dots - cyan, magenta, yellow and black, whereas your monitor will display any single colour with only one screen pixel. If this is still all a bit hard to grasp, don't worry, you're not on your own but a good rule of thumb is to remember that your average computer monitor show the printed quality 4-times as big as the printed output. In other words, if your initial image looks good full screen it will be output on paper to that same quality on paper but only a quarter of the size to retain that quality. So an image 1200x800 pixels, fills your screen and looks great, to fill an a4 printed space (about the same size as the average screen) then your picture needs to be some 4000 pixels.

You should also always check your colour levels before printing. Another thing to check in your design files is the balance of levels. Remember screens are naturally very bright. Photo editing software such as Photoshop has features like auto levels which will automatically optimize the colours, or you can choose to manually adjust them using a slider. There are lots of cheaper or free programs also available now that can also do similar things. For example if you have a photo of someone with the sky in the background, you'll sometimes notice that the face comes out a bit on the dark side because the camera didn't want to overexpose the sky when taking the photograph. But for your artwork, nine times out of ten it's the subject is more important than the sky. Don't forget that this will show up to be worse on printed media. Therefore, it's a good idea to lift the levels of the photo to display the subject and overexpose the sky which will of course go white (i.e no ink on the paper). This doesn't look quite as bad as an overexposed image on screen where the power of the backlight on the monitor will blind you somewhat.

Lastly, when images are repeatedly saved and saved again, each time with a level of compression (such as a jpg) then reduction in quality becomes visible. Sometimes naked to the eye on screen, these can lower the sharpness and colour density of the printed image. If possible, find the original highest resolution image for your artwork. Look out for free or low-cost plugins for popular editing software that automatically removes digital artefacts and noise etc. But it is always better to seek out the highest quality image to start with.

Technology has moved a long way in recent years and it is now common place to find outlets for printing superb quality documents at very high resolutions in large, medium or very small quantities. Setup costs have fallen considerably with various technologies and it is now possible to seek out cheap printing at high qualities. Cheap-printing-spain.com is one example of such a printer in Spain. They optimize the whole printing process through the use of technology and digital print processes to suit a client's particular needs. The result is great value for marketing and advertising through printing. Now, more than ever, marketing budgets are incredibly tight and the need for value for money is essential. Many are focusing more and more on internet marketing, so every cent you spend on Print shop Barcelona now really needs to count.




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