Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 4/28/2009

Question
QUESTION: Hi. First off, thank you for your help.

I am a starting to design wedding invitations. I went to a professional printer, who uses digital offset printers, and asked for their requirements. They told me that the design should be "at least 300 dpi." I was also advised to use vectors. I use photoshop and not good at all at Illustrator so my option is to use Photoshop. I was told they (the printer) use photoshop as well, they just use a 300dpi setting. how can change the setting of photoshop from ppi to dpi? and why does my 1000ppi design look awful in InDesign (pixelated)? at first i thought maybe the printout would be different from the screen resolution, but when i used the type tool of InDesign to type a few words on top of my 1000ppi photoshop file, the words did not turn out to be pixelated. i understand that the reason is because InDesign uses vectors.

So if i have made a 1000ppi design in photoshop and it still looks pixelated in InDesign (on my monitor), does this mean that I have got to learn Illustrator just so i can design invitations and for their printout to be great?

i really do need your help. God bless.

ANSWER: Hi Honey,

First, DPI and PPI are the same thing.

Second 1000 ppi is very large and unless a printer has specifically told you to go that large, you are wasting time and memory. Ask them what the optimum resolution is. Most printers only go 300 dpi to 600 dpi. So when the printer prints this or you transpose to PDF, it throws out the extra 700-400 ppi. It will not make a difference if the printer can only go 300-600 dpi/ppi.

When you place in InDesign go to View>Display Performance>High Quality. The default shows a lo-res version.

The other thing that could be happening is that if you are placing this at 1000 ppi, your image size may be reduced to fit in InDesign. A reduction less than 50% degrades your image, hence why you should work in the recommended dpi/ppi.

Thanks

Kevin



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: hi, kevin. thank you for your very helpful reply. I have a follow up question, i hope it's okay.

what is the best mode to use in creating templates for invitations? CMYK or RGB? What bit should I use? 8,16, or 32 bits/channel? Would the bits highly affect the print out? thanks in advance.

honey

Answer
Hi,

CMYK is the end result for print, but you can start in RGB. For now, Id just stick with working in CMYK.

Next, You can only use 8-bit for printed work. 16 or 32 will not work.

On a side note, and Im making an assumption from the questions you are asking is that you are fairly new to using these applications.

I would highly suggest investing in some books (Adobe Classroom in a book series, print design book, etc.). The questions you are wondering about are just the beginning. You will run into many more issues as you go along and if you are not aware of them ahead of time could be disasterous (paper types, inks, saturation levels, font issues, what to do with lo-res images, etc.).  

This will help you get started in the right direction if this is something you want to seriously pursue.

Thanks!

Kevin