Ben Low wrote:
Peter,
I love it. A crash course in graphics. All at once. Whoosh. Just a couple of questions then:
1. If I rebuild this in Photoshop, will most of the problems you mention be taken care of automatically? I've never had a printer reject a Photoshop. I have had a printer reject a Pages\PDF ... which is what got me started on all this. But Photoshop rasterizes all the text ... so I've been told this is not ideal for the printer. I'm very comfortable with Photoshop (at least in terms of creating the design ... I can't even pretend to know about the subtleties of output for printing).
Please not Photoshop. You should keep everything vector as far as possible and whilst photoshop can do that, with work, it is hard going. Definitely don't rasterise line work. eg your logos in thgis work.
2. I do have Illustrator, but I spent an hour trying to figure out how to do a soft drop shadow ... and finally gave up. I actually spent three hours trying (and failing) to rebuild a graphic that took me twenty minutes to create in Pages ... and the frustration level was a formula for an aneurism.
I cut my teeth on Illustrator 1.0, actually Cricket before it, and I also suffer from frustration with the way Adobe has laid it out. They keep shuffling things around with every version too. Still it does things I can't do anywhere else.
3. My InDesign is several operation systems old and no longer functions (not to mention I've mislaid the registration number). But. If I saved my pennies. And rebuilt this in InDesign, would most of the problems you mention automatically go away (just be the nature of how InDesign creates things)?
InDesign CS4 has all the proofing tools you need and once set up will do the preflight I just did. Further if you go to a competent printer they will give you the profile that will more or less make it automatic. You will still need to study up what it all means and how to get a usable workflow. Not just push a button.
4. You say: "6 of the photos have too high resolution which will have affected the sharpening." What is 'too high resolution'? I'm embarrassed, looking at the photos now, that they are a collection of mis-matched dpi's. The highest appears to be 400 dpi. This was an old film job that's been resurrected, and I made the mistake of not carefully checking each of the graphics going into it. What dpi should I be working with, as a rule, so I won't have issues about sharpening?
For commercial offset the target is twice the screen resolution for digital work it can be less but not less than 1.5 times. Once you have your size, sharpen consistently in Photoshop at that size so it looks
just oversharp on screen.
I think my major question would be: is there an app I can work with that will automatically take care of most of those issues created by Pages? Like InDesign. And that won't require me to learn all that YOU know to be able to get the job done?
You can manually add crops, slugs and bleed in Pages by making the document oversize and drawing them in. You can even fix the resolution. You can do nothing about the lack of spot colors or "specials". There however remains the lack of spreads, but most of all the lack of feedback as to what Pages and OSX are up to behind your back. To make sure every object was printable you'd have to pick through them one by one and tick them off a hand written list and that is a ridiculous way to work. Then you would still not be certain.
InDesign and Quark are still the only 2 serious places to work on the Mac. I don't know how well Windows 7 has fixed things, but Mac OSX is your greatest enemy to producing usable print. ID & QXP circumvent OSX's failings.
Only if Apple chooses to fix the things it leaves everyone to believe it has actually implemented in OSX, will you be able to use the more inexpensive software that relies on the system for output. I had great hopes for Snow leopard but it has turned out to be a vast disappointment.
Peter
