I can understand not wanting pdfs, but if something’s saved to a jpeg or some other format, surely it’s just the same as if you’ve put it together using any other program - isn’t it? Two printing shops (the kind that print glossy flyers and the like) have told a friend of mine that they don’t like to print anything done on Photoshop. They like Scribus, they say.
Now, Photoshop is what I’m used to, and while I’m willing to take a look at Scribus (I have it downloaded, but haven’t played with it yet), I’m a little leery of leaving Photoshop behind.
Is there anything to this? Or, if presented with a non-pdf made on Photoshop, will they be unable to tell the difference?
It sounds more like they don’t want to pay for Photoshop and would rather use Scribus, which is free. Although that doesn’t really make sense, because Photoshop is a photo manipulation program and Scribus is a desktop publishing program – the open-source equivalent of InDesign. I would think that if you save your document as a high-quality JPG or PNG file, it shouldn’t matter to them whether you made it in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, CorelDraw or some other program.
Any print shop shoving aside Photoshop is ignoring professional art processing.
If you output a file as a TIF or low-compression JPG, no print shop should care. Yes, metadata is imbedded in some files that tells what created it, but Photoshop creates the standard and everything else has to conform. Although I’m not a big fan of PS myself (it’s too hard to use compared with equivalent programs), it isn’t a rogue routine they can dismiss.
As far as PDFs, if you create them properly (!), they are the gold standard for printing shops and presses. I switched all my output to PDF about 20 years ago and won’t look back. You can’t believe the hassles other formats caused due to incompatibilities and ignorance of the pressops. PDFs solved all that.
On reading your post again, I should probably follow-up with a question - what kind of document do you want to have printed? Is it a photo, or a predominantly text-based document? Because if it’s the latter, then I can definitely see where they would want a PDF or InDesign file instead.
I’d bet what they don’t want is PSD files. But if it’s a jpg or a tif, I don’t they would really go into the metadata to see what programs you’ve used.
To be honest - I don’t know. I’m editing / redesigning a flyer for said friend, and what he told me was that they don’t like Photoshop images. I got the impression that they wouldn’t do it, but it could as easily have been advice from them. If there’s some sort of problem with Photoshop images, I’d rather give my friend something done on Scribus (or, ideally, done on Photoshop, but saved in such a way that there won’t be any problems).
Ah, now…I recognise these words, but I’m not quite tech savvy enough to know what they actually mean. Care to translate for me?
Yeah, predominantly text based. I use Photoshop because I, personally, am more in tune with the visual design. But it’s a flyer with information, first and foremost.
Rasterized output is saved as actual pixels. Vector-based output is based basically on lines and curves and resolution-independent. Take a font, for instance. It can be described as a series of lines and curves, so if you print it up 100 feet tall or 1/2 inch tall, you can get a perfectly smooth and high resolution result. If you take the bitmap of a 1/2 inch font and try to scale it up to 100 feet, it is going to look jaggedy and blocky. This will give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
‘Raster’ means ‘built of small squares (called pixels)’ which means it only looks good at one size. Think of a tile mosaic. Zooming and shrinking make it look like crap, unless you apply some tricky algorithms, in which case it looks like smoothed-over crap.
‘Vector’ means ‘built out of lines and shaded regions’, which means you can zoom and shrink it to any size and it will look about as good as it ever did.
A vector file format is a set of instructions on how to draw an image. Those instructions can be automatically adapted for any number of different screen and paper sizes. A raster file format is the image itself, and will only ever look good at the size it was created at.
Photoshop is bitmap-based, not raster. Raster is a TV concept of horizontal lines.
The output of vector-based programs, if properly made into PDFs, preserves both the vector components (scalability) and the bitmap elements (photos). The printer doesn’t care how you got there if you do it right. Most printers (printshops) would prefer PDFs over any other format as long as you don’t ask them to modify your output. And any printshop that dared modify my output after I warned them not to just lost my account.
What the printshop doesn’t want is something you printed on your home printer, then scanned to a PDF. That destroys all the advantages of both vector and scalable aspects all at once. But that’s what some people bring in to Kinko’s and wonder why they don’t get the best results.
JohnnyMac, vector-based means the drawing is defined using lines and trigonometry; draw a line from point A(x,y) to point B(x,y) and you have part of a letter. Repeat for the rest of the letter or object. This is very CPU-intensive, but has the advantage that the drawn line will be as sharp (least jaggies) as the printer can handle. If the printer can print at 2400DPI, your slanted line will be extremely high quality. If 300DPI, not so much. But the same file can produce either result – it depends on the output device you are using.
Bitmaps, in contrast, are literally dots described by location and color. They can be scaled down without much loss, but not up. So if your line (or text) was originally a tiny bitmap, when printed larger on a better printer, will look really ugly.
Bitmaps also take a lot of data storage. They are best used for photos.
Vectors are best used for fonts or most any non-photo drawing.
The charm of PDF is it can combine both bitmaps and vector data without compromise of either, but only if it is done right.
Oh, wow, and here I was thinking everything was built of pixels. I suppose all scanned images are raster based as a matter of course? (There are a couple on the flyer).
Yes: All photographs and scanned images are raster-based. You can draw vectors on top of the images, or trust a program to do it for you, but they come out of the camera or scanner as bitmaps.
The two terms are used interchangeably, in my experience. In fact, Photoshop itself uses the term “rasterizing” in its interface. (For example, make a type layer. Right click on the type layer. One of your options is “rasterize type.”)
Musicat: there are scanned images, but they’re - well, actually fuck it. I’ll try using the tablet. Then there won’t be any scanned images. I’m just attached to pen and paper for less geometrical images.
If I use a drawing tablet, will the images be vector-based?
If the tablet proves too frustrating (I’ve managed sketches on it percfectly well in the past, but I haven’t tried anything with really clean lines yet) - if it’s too frustrating, I suppose I’ll just have to go with a high quality scan.
I don’t intend the printer to have to do any editing or fiddling around with what we send them.
As a long-time prepress professional, although no longer on the front-line, so to speak, receipt of a text-heavy doc built purely in Photoshop (as opposed to an actual page layout app like InDesign or QuarkXPress) suggested that there were likely lots of other problems to watch for. It’s not that you can’t do it, but an experienced pro most likely wouldn’t.
It all depends on what app you’re using and what tool within that app. In Photoshop, for example, you go either way depending on whether you’re using brushes or the pen tools.
