ImagesMagUK_November_2021

www.images-magazine.com 34 images NOVEMBER 2021 TIPS & TECHNIQUES Industry experts provide insight and guidance in all areas of digital garment and textile printing Digital helpdesk Getting your DPI confused with your RGB? Ensure your files are perfectly prepared for print with expert advice from Martin Southworth of Hybrid Services, Mimaki’s distributor for the UK and Ireland Martin Southworth sounds simple, but when clients request a 10ft feather flag based on the logo on their business card, scanning it in won’t cut the mustard. Vectored logos, 300dpi images and CMYK colour images all give better results, with sharp edges, accurate colours and images that won’t pixelate when reproduced at size. Artwork size With soft signage, flags and other large graphics that require finishing (trimming, eyeleting or welding), it’s important to factor in bleed and ‘safe’ areas that will be taken up with hardware or lost altogether as they’re trimmed or otherwise obscured. Using guides and crop marks in the original artwork will help to keep the main design message uninterrupted, but if you’re not designing at 100%, don’t forget to scale these areas too. For example, a 50mm hem area will be represented as 12.5mm bleed on the artwork if you’re working at 25% and upsizing in the RIP. Alignment Does everything look right on the design? Not ‘about right’, but really right. Using inbuilt alignment tools to ensure key design elements are perfectly positioned to each other Preparation is key if you want to wow your customers when using digital printers such as the Mimaki TS100-1600 pictured here E nsuring your digital artwork is correctly set up can be the difference between a print that wows your customer and one that loses your reputation in a flash. Delivering printed products that hit the mark every time relies on getting the groundwork right and the old adage that ‘it’s all in the preparation’ is certainly true when it comes to generating print files. The following examples consider full- colour printing on a wide format printer such as a Mimaki TS100-1600 dye-sub model or a Tx300P-1800MkII direct-to- fabric solution, using design software such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw before putting the file through a RIP in order to send the design to the printer. There are key elements to tie down in your artwork and it’s for this reason that busy design studios will have some form of checklist or ‘sign-off sheet’ that accompanies each job. During the artworking process, the designer will tick off key elements that collectively ensure best practice has been adhered to when preparing the file for print. These will include some or all of the following: Images and linked files When constructing complex designs, it’s good working practice to link (rather than embed) image files in applications such as Adobe Illustrator. This allows the designer to edit the original image and for changes to take place in the final file automatically. If those links break, a low-res preview could be left, causing a loss of quality in the final result, so it’s important to ensure they’re present and correct when saving the final file. Good quality, print-ready images The bigger the final result, the bigger and higher quality the artwork needs to be. It