Preparing Your Print Jobs for Online Printing: Part 1 of 3 Color

If you do any of your own printing, you’ve probably noticed that the colors you see on the screen are somewhat different than what you actually get when you print out your image. The reason for this is in the basic principles of visible color. In order to understand this, it’s necessary to understand a few terms used in the printing business.

• RGB. Red, Green, and Blue. Your computer monitor displays images in these three colors. These same three colors are used by digital cameras and scanners to create images. (Remember how the early digital cameras tended to make everyone look red-faced? Digital photography and color printing have come a long way since then.)

• CMYK. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Printers, including professional printing presses used by online printing companies, use combinations of these four colors to create the spectrum of colors in the images they produce. The colors can be combined to create just about any color in your images, including the rich colors in photographs that you may want to use in greeting card printing.

• Emitted vs. Reflected Light. You may recall from an art or physics class that color is actually the result of the way our eyes perceive wavelengths of light. The computer screen is emitting light at the various wavelengths that produce red, green, and blue, whereas when we look at colors on paper, what we are seeing are the reflected wavelengths that are not absorbed by the color on the surface. It really isn’t necessary to understand the intricacies of just how this works; it is just a further explanation of why things look different on the screen compared with how they look on paper.

What is important to know is that some color variation is unavoidable, but it is possible to get very similar colors. Some printing companies recommend that you change the colors in your images to CMYK before submitting them for printing so that you get to see the colors as closely as possible, and if there is anything in the translation that you don’t like, you have the opportunity to edit it.

Online printing companies offer an array of tools to help you get your submissions just right because they want you to be happy with the printed product. If you need help converting your files to CMYK, PrintingForLess.com offers instructions for doing so in Microsoft Publisher 2000, Microsoft Publisher 2003-2007 (or later), Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw 9, Adobe Illustrator, Quark Xpress 4.1, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe Pagemaker 6.5.

If you aren’t working in a graphic editing software package but have your documents in a more basic program such as Adobe’s Photoshop LE or PhotoDeluxe, or you are using a Microsoft program like Powerpoint, Word, or PhotoDraw, then the program does not support the conversion, but the online print shop can do it for you.

Graphics have become an integral part of almost any marketing piece these days; even business card printing typically involves at least a color logo, and it is becoming more common to have attention-getting images on the back side of business cards. Make the most of your printed products by including color graphics and images, and be sure to check into online printing companies to make the most of your time and money.