Everyday, we are exposed to a variety of image formats in the process of purchasing print images, creating documents, and file preflights. For example: PNG, BMP
, GIF and JPEG. However, we often do not know what these acronyms mean and which image formats are more suitable for print production.
Claudia McCue, the author of the book "The Real Printing Production," not only explains to the reader how to print the ideal job, but also points out the problems that the printing factory should avoid in the production process. With the following points, you may not waste too much time supervising the production process.
1. Some image formats are more suitable for use on the screen and on the web. For example: PNG (abbreviation of Portable Network Graphics, meaning portable network image) can contain RGB, index color and transparency and other image elements. Although PNG images can achieve higher resolution, it does not have the ability to support CMYK color space.
2.Windows format BMP (abbreviation of bitmap) can support from 1-bit (black and white, no gray scale) to 32-bit (millions of colors) color depth, but does not have support for CMYK, so It is also not suitable for printing.
3. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format abbreviation for the meaning of the graphics exchange format) is only suitable for use on the network, because it is the original resolution is relatively low, and can only call up to 256 colors. So do not use GIF images in printing.
4. The name of JPEG (short for Joint Photographic Experts Group) comes from the committee that created it and enjoys a very high reputation in the printing industry. It is a lossy compression algorithm. In other words, to generate a smaller digital file, it discards some of the information in the image.
5. If an image has a sufficiently high resolution, printing on a slightly compressed JPEG file will not significantly impair the quality of the image, but if too much information is compressed, then there will be a rectangle in the image. Distorted, especially in the details area.
From this we can see that printing is not an arbitrary process. We can only lay the right foundation for perfect printing production by choosing the right image format.