Printing from Mac AD

[jackamus]

What would be the best way to save a jpeg file generated on a Mac AD for subsequent reproduction on a commercial ink jet printer?

[Alfred]

In general, PDF is probably the best format for commercial printing, but you should communicate with your printer. They may well prefer that you simply supply them with the JPEG.

[jackamus]

Thanks Alfred. What I meant was what is the best may to save the jpeg to get the best colour. I suppose it would be to do with the way I have set up my Preferences.

[Alfred]

I’m not sure what you mean by “best colour”, Jack. You’ll obviously lose fidelity if you work with bright RGB colours and then have your work printed in CMYK.

[jackamus]

That's what I mean! For printing I really ought to work in CMYK rather than RGB.

[Alfred]

 

4 minutes ago, jackamus said:

For printing I really ought to work in CMYK rather than RGB.

 

Yes, I would think so.

[firstdefence]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

In general, PDF is probably the best format for commercial printing, but you should communicate with your printer. They may well prefer that you simply supply them with the JPEG.

 

PDF’s
It is recommend by most print suppliers that you supply a press ready PDF file where possible. All fonts must be embedded and the file must be high resolution (at least 300dpi or higher to achieve the best possible results). The file needs to ideally be in CMYK, (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black), RGB files can be printed on most digital and large format printers but the colour reproduction can be unpredictable.

Bleed
All designs that bleed off the edge of a document must have a bleed area of at least 3mm to ensure no white edge appears when guillotined down to finished size.

[jackamus]

Thanks for the info but supposing the image to be printed is just a photo. It is still worth saving it as a pdf?

[Fixx]

Why bother adjusting a photo in AD when there is AP also? I would use TIF but there is not so much difference to JPG, best quality.

If printer is inkjet you probably best to stay in RGB. Modern inkjets use CMYK true but there are also lots of other inks, maybe a dozen different colours and shades in pure inks already. I would use Adobe RGB and let the printer (person) choose right paper profile and settings.

 

[gdenby]

In Preferences, check out the options for "Rendering Intent." The ones I have some knowledge on are perceptual and colorimetric. Both push the larger computer color space within the smaller CMYK printer color space. My limited experience is that it depends on the image, so I can't recommend a best way.

 

If an image has colors that are mostly within the printer gamut, colorimetric seemed to my eyes to work better. The would be little color info that would be mashed down to fit into the printer ink color space.

 

For me, perceptual usually was better because all of the hues were equally distorted, and visual perception tends to balance inputs with the "normal" "real" appearance,.  Sometimes, if there was a lot of info outside the gamut, the image gets really distorted color wise.