I recently took over the advertising for the company I work for, including print ads. Keeping in mind that I’m more or less a rank amateur and glorified photoshop dork when it comes to stuff like this…
I do an ad in black and white. It looks good here. I send it off to these stoneage weirdos who refuse to convert to email, computers, *.tif files, etc. I think they took my poor little ad, cut it out, taped it to a sheet and photocopied the whole thing onto a sheet of newsprint. :~( It looked so bad I felt like crying.
My Questions: How do I get a grayscale img to look good when printed on newsprint? Does it have something to do with half-toning? Am I retarded??!
Yes, somewhere along the line the grayscale needs to be converted to a halftone. It’s been a while but I think the finest we went for newsprint at the place I used to work was a 100-line screen. The print shop people ought do be able to do this, with or without a computer.
For a good halftone, you also need to watch the contrast and the amount of dot in the highlight and shadow areas. You don’t want those areas to go solid or your photo will look flat and muddy or washed out.
If they did shoot a halftone for you, they may not have known how to do it correctly, or there may have been ink/water balance problems on press.
I’d talk to your printing people and find out what they do on their end and exactly what they need from you. If you’ve been dealing with a newspaper ad department, ask to talk to the prepress department, who will be in a better position to give you the technical info.
Oh man, this is a rough question. Since it sounds like the paper is living in the stone age you need to give them stone age art, which means a “mechanical” or a “velox.”
Explaining how to make a mechanical would take forever, so get a (old) book that explains the process. But Scarlett is right – you want to talk to the prepress guys/gals first. They’ll tell you how crazy you have to go in preparing the mechanical.
There is another way – it’s called a “velox,” which is essentially camera-ready art that has already been “screened” (by you) in the gray areas. All the printer does is shoot the velox as line art just as you gave it to him/her. (This, incidentally, sounds like how he treated the art you gave him – but your art was probably screened too fine for him to shoot properly; see more below.) Using a velox gives you less-than-great gray tones, but it is more foolproof than using a mechanical and is usually perfectly okay for newspaper ads.
Veloxes are screened at 65 to 85 lines per inch. (Newspapers – as of 15 years ago – generally print at 85 lpi, but maybe it’s up to 100 lpi these days. Dunno. Ask the prepress guys.)
So, I would suggest the velox route; give them artwork that YOU have already screened at, say, 85 lpi and tell them to shoot it as line art. They should be able to capture the dots, no sweat.
[I just reread my post. Is it hopelessly incomprehensible? Sorry.]