Photo by James Scott on Unsplash
Negosentro | Color Profiles, Bleeds, and Proofing Mistakes to Avoid in the Prepress Journey | Prepress is the process every print service provider must go through before printing. It includes preparing a file for printing, which involves color correction, resolution adjustments, bleeds, and proofing to ensure a high-quality printed product.
However, these prepress steps can be challenging for some designers. Consequently, the mistakes can be pretty expensive, considering you can easily avoid them. Therefore, we’ll provide tips for approaching color profiles, bleeds, and proofing to help you understand them better and avoid making costly mistakes.
Color profiles
When editing an image, you must pay attention to colors. That includes dealing with instructions that define the colors of the image, called color profiles. Color profiles help ensure that colors are consistent across different devices and when printed. Moreover, they help make colors accurate and suitable for the printed image.
Understanding color profiles is of significant importance in the prepress process. There are several different types of color profiles. The two most common are RGB and CMYK. It’s essential to understand their purposes.
RGB is suitable for digital displays, while CMYK is perfect for printing. Thus, if you’re preparing a photo for printing, set the color profile to CMYK so that the printed colors look accurate once you print the image.
However, you must use the correct settings when converting an image to the desired color profile. Otherwise, your colors might be dull or over-saturated.
Therefore, make sure to set the correct settings and avoid color shifts. That will help you avoid multiple prints that can cost you a lot.
Bleeds
Bleeds refer to the areas around the picture going beyond the trim size of the printed image. They extend the image’s background to ensure no white borders around the printed image. Usually, the bleed size is set to 3 mm, but you can set it to fit your needs. If unsure, you can check your printer for the preferred bleed size.
Therefore, it’s essential to set the bleeds correctly and avoid putting important elements of the image into the bleeds, as they will get cut off. Moreover, pay attention to the pictures you span over the page and how you plan on extending them into the bleed area. Like with color profiles, if you don’t do it correctly, you’ll need to redo it repeatedly until you find the sweet spot, which can result in higher costs.
Proofing
Proofing is the most critical part of the prepress journey. It’s checking your design before printing to ensure everything is as you need it to be.
You can use soft and hard proofing. Soft proofing means previewing the design on the screen, while hard proofing means printing a physical copy to review it before the final print.
Soft proofing is often better because it enables you to quickly and efficiently catch and correct mistakes. However, hard proofing could be more accurate as it lets you see the physical printed proof of your work, even though it can be costly to do it every time.
Therefore, we suggest that you implement soft proofing into every prepress process as it allows you to check for possible errors, review the colors, and adjust the bleeds. That way, you can save time and money once you print your images.
Conclusion
Prepress is a challenging but necessary process that will help you avoid costly mistakes and make high-quality prints. Once you understand the basics of color profiles, bleeds, and proofing, you can save time and money while creating prints of high quality.
Therefore, always set your color profiles accurately, adjust the bleeds correctly, and proof your work thoroughly. Implementing these prepress tips whenever you need to print will help you avoid costly mistakes.
Photo by James Scott on Unsplash
