Supplying a PDF When exporting your PDF, please select "Press Quality" and have bleed switched to "on" with 3mm all around (Top, Left, Right, Bottom). If your document has spot colours included please select "Output", "Ink Manager" and tick convert all spots to process.
Add Bleed to your document If you have colour/images continuing to the edge of your document, please add an extra 3mm past the documents edge. This is to avoid your printing from having a very fine white line when being trimmed by the finishing department. You can watch a tutorial on bleed here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaL8WXets08
Using large areas of black If you use a large area of black i.e. as a background colour then we recommend setting the colour values to Cyan: 30% Magenta: 0% Yellow: 0% and Black: 100%
All Colours as CMYK The default display mode on a computer is RGB (RED GREEN BLUE). For printing we require the colours to be converted to CMYK colour mode (CYAN MAGENTA YELLOW BLACK). Supplying your artwork with RGB text and images can lead to unexpected results.
Disable Overprinting Please don't set any colours to overprint within your document. Our preflight system will apply the optimum print settings for the best finish.
Keep colours above 10% If you are using a tint of a colour i.e. yellow then please make sure that it's colour value is at minimum 10%. A 5% tint of yellow is barely visible.
Keep text as text. We recommend setting all text in a DTP package i.e. Adobe InDesign. This keeps the text in vector format (drawn using a series of mathematical calculations) and achieves the best output. Setting text on a Photoshop document and then flattening will result in the text edge becoming a fine dot (part of an image). Whilst in most cases this appears ok, it does not have the optimum appearance of vector output.
Supply all images at 300dpi For a good quality print all images should be 300dpi at the desired print size, an A4 document for example would be: Width: 210mm Height: 297mm Resolution: 300dpi