Expert: Glen Demers - 12/27/2009

Question
I'm a co-owner of a new business that deals mainly with blank greeting cards with nature photos on the cover.  We're also dipping into new areas such as mouse pads.  I wanted a mouse pad to bear a nature photo as well as my company name, web address and logo.  In order to do this, I had to copy the JPEG photo onto Word, make the changes using Word's drawing program, copy the whole thing onto the Paint program and save it as JPEG.  It worked, but although the mouse pad came out nicely, the clarity was greatly reduced.  Is there any way I can either increase the clarity or use a program or process to keep the original clarity settings?

Answer
Hi Talisha,

Word is a low resolution program made for business letters, at the very least you should be using Publisher or since you have Photoshop, invest in the suite with InDesign and Illustrator.

Your image's resolution is set in Photoshop, for offset printing the preferred resolution is 300dpi. If you are setting small type in Photoshop we recommend going up to 400dpi, but generally you shouldn't set type in Photoshop unless you want to apply Photoshop effects to it (Bevel, Emboss, Glow etc.) There is an excellent discussion of resolution here: http://www.bestprintingonline.com/resolution.htm

Common workflows involve bringing images into a page layout program such as QuarkXpress or InDesign. The programs link to the images without embedding them in the document as Word does, this keeps document size small and allows images to be printed with maximum resolution. Type set with these programs is vector not bitmap and is as sharp as the output device will allow. When you copy type into a paint program the type is rasterized(converted from vector to bitmap) and the clarity is greatly reduced. The latest versions of Quark and InDesign also allow many effects to be applied to type such as glows and drop shadows.

If your mousepad manufacturer insists on JPEG files you can output PDF's from your page layout program. The pdf's will retain the clarity of type and can be opened in Photoshop where you can set the resolution and color space necessary for the JPEG.

Hope this helps,

Happy Holidays,
Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

For more Photoshop tips please visit our help pages here: http://www.bestprintingonline.com/photoshop.htm