Document Set Up For Printing

[revelmo2]

I don't really know anything about this, so please excuse my stupid questions.

          I want to create a document in Affinity Photo that I will send to a printing company to be printed as a poster. The size of the final print will be 18 inches by 24 inches. So, how should I set up the document. I think I should set the color mode to CMYK and the dpi to 300, but that's about all I know. What should all the other settings be set to ?

          Also, what size should I make the document ? Does the document in AP actually have to be 18" x 24". When I try a document that size my AP seems to start lagging a little, especially if I'm using a larger brush (I don't know if it's just my computer or AP). If I made the AP document half-sized (9" x 12") or even one-fourth sized (4.5" x 6") while I work on it and then resize it to full size (18" x 24") to export it, would that have a negative effect on the quality of the final print ?

          Finally, unless the printing company specifies a certain file type, what is the best file type to export the document in ?

    I appreciate any help that anybody can give me.

    Thanks...             

[ronnyb]

I would talk to your printer right away and see what specs they require. You're going to need to add space for a bleed and trim, which isn't currently supported within the UI, but you can set up your document specs to include the extra space required by your printer, and then define the bleed area using the supported "margins" functionality in AP/AD.

 

As far as scaling the artwork, it will loose fidelity unless it's vector... Try tweaking your performance settings to see if you can get better performance without having to sacrifice image quality. Additionally, smart layer management can help ease performance woes...

 

As far as final output format, that really depends on your printer, but I would avoid Rossy formats like JPG, and go with something like flattened PSD or TIFF with LZW or ZIP (non-lossy) compression.