Printing Fundamentals: How to Set Up Your Print

Printing Fundamentals: How to Set Up Your Print

Setting up your file for print can be confusing if you are unfamiliar with how the print industry works. From understanding the difference between RGB and CMYK, vector and bitmap images, to applying crop marks to your file, there are several important factors to consider. It can be frustrating to receive your printed goods only to find unwanted colour changes, important sections removed, or incorrect sizing. With GD Print’s 40+ years of print experience, we’ll break down some of the most common problems customers face when setting up artwork for print and answer them throughout this article.

RGB vs CMYK Explained

RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) are the two primary colour models used for design and printing, they represent how each system renders the colours and the output of that processing. Computer screens render colour in RGB, millions of microscopic hues of red, green and blue that, when combined together, create a moving or still image on your screen. Most commercial digital printers use the CMYK colour model, applying millions of tiny cyan, magenta, yellow and black dots to a white surface. These dots are placed in precise patterns and densities, blending together to create the full range of colours perceived by the human eye. 

Can I Print in RGB? It is impossible to print in RGB, so converting your colours to CMYK is ultimately unavoidable when printing, making it crucial to prepare your artwork in the correct colour mode, otherwise there may be confusion to some users when there print comes out more muted than how it looks on the computer screen. Popular applications, such as the Adobe suite, allow you to view your work in CMYK, simulating how the colours will appear when printed by adjusting the colours displayed on your screen. This is particularly relevant for artists or any profession that is looking for an accurate representation of how their artwork will appear in print compared with how it looks on screen. Can CMYK be Vibrant? CMYK can be vibrant as long as you prepare for it, printing in CMYK does not necessarily guarantee a worse or lesser print quality, just a different one. By changing colours to a more CMYK friendly gamut you can ensure the colours are more accurate and suitable for CMYK. Avoid neon or fluorescent colours, metallic effects, and highly saturated colour combinations, as these can be difficult to reproduce accurately in CMYK. Ultimately, set your document to CMYK and experiment to see what works best for your print.

A comparison between RGB and CMYK colour, the result is more noticeable on printed media, than on a computer monitor.

RGB vs CMYK a Comparison

For a further, more in-depth look into RGB vs CMYK, check our article here.

Bleed & Crop Marks Guide

Bleed and crop marks are essential for ensuring your artwork is printed and trimmed correctly. They tell the printer where the final document should be cut and help prevent unwanted white edges or important design elements from being trimmed away. While they can seem confusing at first, understanding how bleed, crop marks and safe zones work is one of the most important aspects of preparing artwork for print. Here are some more in depth examples of what each mark in printing is and what to look out for when printing.

Trim Marks Trim marks, also known as crop marks, are essential marks on a print-ready file that indicate to the printer where to cut. Because commercial print jobs require a bleed area, an additional 3–5 mm (depending on the print company) is left outside the finished document to be trimmed away, ensuring the design extends cleanly to the edge of the final print. Trim Line Trim lines are a user friendly visualization of where the bleed area is on your print, helping you accurately plan around bleed. Safe Zone The safe zone is the area of your print where all crucial content should be placed to avoid it being cut off during trimming or appearing too close to the edge. Safe zones are an important print design guideline that adds professionalism to your work and demonstrates careful planning throughout your design.

How to Set Up Print Marks

Print marks can be added easily using popular design applications such as Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop when exporting your artwork. They can also be applied when creating a print-ready PDF using Adobe Acrobat or other PDF software. If your artwork has already been designed with bleed and safe zones in mind, many online tools and commercial printers can also add print marks for you. However, it’s important to remember that print marks cannot compensate for artwork that hasn’t been prepared correctly, so planning for bleed and safe zones from the start of the design process is always recommended.

The GD Print Difference

At GD Print, we estimate that around 80% of our customers either haven’t prepared their artwork for print, haven’t applied print marks, or are unsure how to do so. While many large-scale printers will print artwork regardless, expecting customers to have the necessary knowledge, GD Print understands that preparing files for print can be confusing.

To help, GD Print offers a free print mark application service and will notify customers if we believe important content may be lost during the printing process. Where only minor adjustments are needed, we’ll make them for you to ensure your artwork is ready for print. Additionally, we’ve created a range of guides to help you better understand crop marks, bleed and how to design artwork with print marks in mind. You can read our guide to crop marks here, or learn more about designing artwork for print marks in our dedicated guide here.

Understanding DPI

DPI (dots per inch) refers to the resolution of an image when it is printed. In simple terms, it determines how much detail is contained within a given area of your print. A higher DPI generally produces sharper, more detailed results because more image information is packed into each inch of the printed design. However, higher-resolution images also create larger file sizes, so it’s important to balance image quality with practical file management.

Why is DPI Important DPI is important because it represents the balance between image quality and file size. A higher DPI is not always the best option, as the ideal resolution depends on how the image will be used. For digital content, such as websites and social media, lower-resolution images  of around 72-100 DPI are often preferred because they reduce file sizes and improve loading speeds without noticeably affecting on-screen quality. For most professional printing, a resolution of around 300 DPI is generally recommended to ensure images appear sharp, detailed and free from visible pixelation. Higher resolutions of 600–1200 DPI may be beneficial for line-based artwork, such as comics, technical drawings and diagrams, where fine detail and crisp edges are essential. Large-format printing, however, typically requires only 35–200 DPI, as it is designed to be viewed from a greater distance, making extremely high resolutions unnecessary. Lower resolutions also help keep file sizes manageable without compromising the perceived print quality. What's the best DPI for my Project? Consider your intended use case. Are your images designed for a poster on a wall or a banner displayed on a building? Will they be used both online and in medium-sized print? For most print applications, the industry standard is around 300 DPI, providing a good balance between image quality and file size. However, if you know exactly how each image will be used and have the flexibility to create multiple versions, it’s always best to optimise the DPI for its intended purpose.

Recommended DPI for your Project?

Vector vs Bitmap Images

Vector and bitmap are the two primary types of graphics used in print, each with its own characteristics and ideal applications. While they may appear similar at first glance, they are fundamentally different. A vector graphic cannot be a bitmap image, and a bitmap image cannot be converted into a true vector without being recreated.

Bitmap Bitmap graphics are the most common type of image. Made up of individual pixels, they are used for photographs, digital artwork, scanned documents, diagrams and most of the images you see on a computer. Bitmap images are the easiest and most flexible image type to work with. Unlike vector graphics, they are not limited to shapes or defined lines and can contain a high level of detail, texture and colour variation. However, because they are made up of individual pixels, they are less scalable. Bitmap images are generally limited to the resolution at which they were created and can lose quality when enlarged, although reducing their size usually has little impact on image quality. Vector Vector graphics are a unique type of image that is scaleable without losing quality. Vector images are technically computer images created using a sequence of commands or mathematical statements. [Ben Lutkevich, TechTarget, 2021] Typically created using applications such as Adobe Illustrator, vector images are more structured than bitmap images, consisting primarily of shapes, paths and solid or curved lines rather than individual pixels. Creating a vector image is a deliberate process  and you won't create one by accident, they can often be identified by their file type or distinctive clean, crisp appearance. Which should I use? In many cases, you won’t have much choice over the image type you use. Images downloaded from stock websites or captured using a camera or smartphone are naturally bitmap images, as are most images found online. Vector graphics are best suited to artwork that needs to be scaled without any loss of quality, such as logos, icons, banners and billboards. Bitmap images, on the other hand, are the preferred choice for photographs, digital artwork and any design that contains complex textures, gradients or fine detail.

Source: Filecamp

Fonts for Print

Fonts are another important consideration when designing your artwork, and finding the right typeface for your project can be a challenge in itself. Fortunately, there are many well-established fonts and font families that have become staples of modern design and are likely to be familiar to you. Think of Arial, a popular choice for professional documents, or Comic Sans, one of the most recognisable and controversial fonts, often regarded as a love-it-or-hate-it typeface.

To help you choose the right font for your project, we’ve compiled a list of popular typefaces, their common use cases and the reasons they’ve remained customer favourites throughout GD Print’s 40+ years in the printing industry.

Best File Formats for Printing

Now that you understand DPI, vector and bitmap images, and bleed guidelines, the next step is choosing the right file format for your artwork. Every file format has its own purpose: PNG is ideal for images with transparent backgrounds, JPEG is a widely supported format for general-purpose images, WEBP is optimised for websites, and TIFF is commonly used for high-quality, uncompressed images. PDF is the industry standard for sharing print-ready artwork, but which file format is actually best for professional printing?

Best File Formats for Printing

Paper Size Guide

Paper size is one of the simplest and most practical aspects of the printing process. With a ruler, you can quickly determine the dimensions you need for your print. However, as discussed in the previous sections on DPI and vector vs bitmap images, it’s important to decide on your final print size before you begin designing. Scaling artwork from A4 to A0+, for example, isn’t always possible without a noticeable loss in quality. By planning your design around its intended print size—or by working with vector graphics where appropriate—you can avoid issues such as pixelation and the need to recreate parts of your artwork. The table below shows the dimensions of the most common paper sizes in centimetres. 

Quick Paper Size Chart

If you’d like a more detailed explanation, take a look at our guide to poster sizes, where we explore each format in more depth. If you’re still unsure which size is best for your project, our article on choosing the right poster size can help you decide.

Exporting Print-Ready Files

Exporting your artwork is one of the most overlooked stages of preparing files for print, particularly for large-format projects. Without realising it, you may be compressing your artwork, exporting it in a file format that isn’t ideal for printing, or scaling it to fit a page without considering how it will be produced commercially rather than on a home printer. These small mistakes can have a significant impact on the quality of the final print.

In this section, GD Print will explain how to export your artwork correctly, breaking down the recommended settings for a range of popular design applications and showing you how to create professional, print-ready files with confidence.

Exporting your file without unnecessary compression is one of the most important steps in preparing artwork for print. Some of the default export settings in popular software, such as the Adobe suite, can compress PDFs, omit bleed and crop marks, or alter your colour settings, all of which can affect the quality of your final print. Not only can the quality of your print suffer, but without bleed and crop marks your chosen printer may proceed with production without contacting you, applying the marks themselves and potentially trimming away important parts of your design. By exporting high-quality, uncompressed files and applying bleed and crop marks yourself, you retain complete control over how your finished print will look.

Uncompressed vs Compressed Example

Exporting Uncompressed PDF's For most commercial print jobs, start by exporting your artwork as a PDF. This is the industry-standard file format because it preserves image quality, fonts, vector graphics and page layout while remaining compatible with virtually all commercial printers. When exporting from Adobe applications: Select PDF as the file format. Choose the High Quality Print preset. Ensure your artwork extends to the bleed line. In the Marks and Bleeds tab, enable Trim Marks and Use Document Bleed Settings. Check that your document is exported using the correct CMYK colour profile where required.

Setting Up Bleed and Default High Quality Settings

Exporting PNG's & JPEGS When exporting images from Adobe applications: ​ Decide whether the image is intended for print or digital use. Export as PNG if you need a transparent background or want to preserve the highest possible image quality. Export as JPEG if a smaller file size is more important and transparency isn’t required. For print, export at 300 DPI (or higher where appropriate) using the correct CMYK colour profile. For web, optimise the image for screen use by exporting at an appropriate resolution and using the RGB colour profile.

Setting Up Correct Image Resolution, Colour and Quality

Print Finishing Guide (Foil, Spot UV, Embossing and More)

Print finishes are the final stage of the printing process, transforming a standard print into a premium product. Whether you’re producing business cards, brochures, packaging or marketing materials, the right finish can enhance the appearance, improve durability and help your design stand out from the competition.

Like every other aspect of print preparation, it’s important to design with your chosen finish in mind. Processes such as Spot UV, foiling and embossing each have their own artwork requirements, limitations and setup guidelines. Planning for these from the beginning of the design process ensures the best possible result. Below is a guide to some of the most popular print finishes and whether they’re available from GD Print.

For information on how to set all these files up, check out our article here.

Ready to Print? Use GD Print

Now that your files have been prepared with the correct bleed and crop marks, are free from pixelation and have been exported in the appropriate format, the final step is choosing the right print provider.

At GD Print, we combine competitive pricing with premium-quality materials, including high-quality silk and Fedrigoni papers, alongside state-of-the-art printing technology and a wide range of professional print finishes to ensure your artwork looks its very best. Here is how we compare to our competitors:

Why Choose GD Print?

With over 40 years of experience, GD Print combines knowledgeable UK-based customer support and high-quality in-house production to ensure every order receives the attention it deserves. Every file is checked by a real person before it goes to print, with free artwork pre-flight checks, bleed and crop mark setup, and minor adjustments included where needed. Combined with premium G.F Smith and Fedrigoni papers, specialist print finishes, low minimum order quantities and environmentally conscious printing practices, GD Print is committed to delivering exceptional quality and outstanding customer service from start to finish. Contact us here to get started with your printing journey.