Print Talk

March 21 2022

VECTOR Artwork

HELP!

Your Sign Guy: I need a vector file of your company logo to cut vinyl letters with.

You: I sent a jpeg file of our company logo, why will this not work?
Short answer? Because it is an image file, it’s a picture, what you need is vector artwork.

Let me help. Below is the definition of both types of files with pictures to help explain.

Example 1
What’s the difference? They both look the same to me!
A vector file is drawn or created in a program such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW and commonly referred to as a .ai file.
An image file is either scanned into the computer, or created in a program such as Adobe Photoshop and saved as a .jpg or .png file.
Image files are also usually pictures, but can also be a logo created in Illustrator (vector) and then saved as a .jpg file (image) format.

Example 2
The sign shop will open your artwork and view it in “Outline” or “Artwork” mode.
If it is a vector file made with a vector software program like Illustrator, it is a “cut-ready” file, ready to use on a plotter to cut vinyl letters, the knife blade of the plotter cuts on the line of the artwork created with vector software programs.
The image file… it can only be printed.

Example 3
If you have vector artwork measuring 5″ and need it to be enlarged to print a 30″ sign, the vector art can be enlarged with no loss of quality.
You cannot enlarge an image file, it is “fixed,” you can reduce the image, but you cannot enlarge the image without loss of quality.

Another Example – Vector art vs an Image file.

Example 1
What’s the difference? They both look the same to me.

Example 2
The sign shop opens your art and views it in “Outline” or “Artwork” mode.

Example 3
As you can see, the vector file, when enlarged, maintains its high quality,
but if you tried to enlarge the image file the quality will only get worse.

Example 4
Files viewed in artwork (outline) mode, vector on the left and an image file on the right.

Please contact me HERE if you have any more questions, or are in need of any kind of artwork created.
To view examples of past artwork I have created, vector and image, view my Flickr site HERE.

March 18 2022

RGB > CMYK

Customer: texts pic of truck, I want a banner this color blue.
Me: You can’t do that.
…and so it begins.

If you know you know, if you don’t lemme help, this post is about converting RGB images to the CMYK color space for printing.

Let’s start with an image, a photo, what you’re looking at right now on your screen is an RGB image, made up of little Red, Green, and Blue LED’s, but to print your photo onto paper it needs to be converted into a CMYK print file. Color printers whether inkjet, laser or commercial sheet-fed offset presses use these 4 colors of ink, and are printed in combination, one over the top of another using semi-transparent inks.

The human eye then blends these colors together to create the illusion of an infinite range of colors, but… there are limitations, some colors cannot be reproduced with this printing process and blues are the worst. Printer manufacturers of “photographic” printers have overcome this by adding more colors, in addition to CMYK, another lighter Cyan and Magenta have been added for a total of 6 colors, this increases the spectrum of colors you can reproduce.

To print an image with a color printer, the image must go through a conversion process, your inkjet printer does it on the fly in the background, commercial printers open photos in Adobe Photoshop and “convert” photos to the CMYK color space ahead of time, some colors do not convert well, they “shift” (see truck pic above) and need to be color corrected with Photoshop to prevent surprise shifts in colors when printing on press.

To print color images on a commercial printing press, a set of color separations is needed.
The separated CMYK plates of the above photo would appear as shown below and each plate prints with it’s corresponding color.

When printed one color over another, as shown below, the look of the original photo is reproduced.

To make a banner of an un-obtainable color using CMYK colors you can create a special “plate” for printing referred to as a “spot” plate. Spot plates can also be used for varnishes and other printing effects.

Commercial printing presses.