Insertable pictures

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Michael E. Burke - 24 Feb 2007 20:57 GMT

I'm in a discussion with a couple of designers and I'm a little unsure about
what questions to ask.

One says it is OK to insert jpegs and gifs in a publisher project for
preprinting, but the other says he only recommends bitmaps, tiffs and png's
sized to the correct dimensions, at 600ppi/dpi. I'm aware of the "lossy"
nature of jpegs and gifs, but is that going to make a difference in
Publisher? Should I use png's and tiff's?

Thanks,

Mike Burke

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Mac Townsend - 25 Feb 2007 03:35 GMT

DO NOT use GIF.

Why? most of the time gifs have a transparent background and in MS Pub THESE CANNOT BE RENDERED IN CMYK/SPOT only in RGB which is useless for prepress. Anyone who advocates use of GIF in prepress-bound projects is inexperienced in the real world of prepress.

JPG is also a bad format to use (my nearly 20 years in prepress suggests this) as it is a lossy formula. That is, it makes all the socks fit in your sock drawer by throwing out some at random. Open and resave, it throws away more data.

And because jpg can make pictures hugely smaller and still look fine on a monitor most people overcompress which makes the problem worse. If you are aware of and know how to handle it, jpg's ok. Newpaper people use it all the time...but then newsprint does a really good job of hiding the artifacts generated (as it does of hiding lots of things that would render the file unusable on a sheet-fed press).

With hard drives as cheap as they are, a proper resolution tiff is the proper way to go. Proper resolution being 200-300 pixels/inch at the final size for the picture. Any substantial amount more than that (600, for instance) can adversely affect the detail in the picture.

> I'm in a discussion with a couple of designers and I'm a little unsure about
> what questions to ask.
[quoted text clipped - 8 lines]
>
> Mike Burke

Mac Townsend
Adcom Graphics, Fairfield, C A
www.adcomgraphics.com

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Odysseus - 27 Feb 2007 02:37 GMT

> I'm in a discussion with a couple of designers and I'm a little unsure about
> what questions to ask.
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> nature of jpegs and gifs, but is that going to make a difference in
> Publisher? Should I use png's and tiff's?

600 ppi is overkill for offset printing; aside from containing four to
seven times as many pixels as are required for 150-lpi screening, you
can't properly judge the sharpness. If possible, size the images in
Photoshop or similar to the correct physical dimensions at a resolution
between 1.4 and 2 times the screen ruling you intend to use, using
Bicubic resampling (if any is required), and sharpen as the last step
before saving.

The types of compression used by the GIF and PNG formats are lossless,
but since they were designed for screen display, only RGB colour is
supported -- a major drawback unless you have well-tuned colour
management. Same for Windows Bitmap (.bmp), but greyscale or lineart is
generally fine in this format. High-quality (minimally compressed) JPEGs
in CMYK colour are usually quite acceptable for printing, unless we're
talking art-book quality.

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Odysseus

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