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Graphic Design Courses Coseley
Many of you following this blog are likely to have any or a lot of familiarity in graphics and web design. So, what is the printing? For any point or another, you are going to want to print something that you have made using your Illustrator and Photoshop expertise. The graphic design course at Blue Sky Graphics will familiarise you with these software and more!
If it is a poster you have been paid to produce or you may like to print your own business cards, it may be difficult to get correct. Let us hope this article will support and lead you to printing perfectly.
There are several styles of printers available: laser jet, bubble jet, thermal printers, inkjet, etc. Inkjet printing is definitely something you are going to bring through and utilise the most. Inkjet printers utilise liquid ink to render the pictures you are producing. Usually inkjet printers have only ink cartridges or ink tanks, the distinction between the two is that ink cartridges have built-in print heads, whereas ink tanks are only a tube.
The ink is “sprayed” or lowered by the printheads to the page drop by the frame, producing the image you are printing.
DPI and CMYK
One of the most relevant aspects to consider is how colours function while writing. Your standard inkjet printer can normally use four cartridges: one black, one cyan, one magenta and one pink, CMYK. Using the CMYK colour model, the printer may use a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow or black to produce almost every colour you like. White is not required and, in a sense, simulates a shortage of colour marks, revealing the white paper behind it, making either a white or a light hue.
When modelling for printing, it might be wise to make sure that you either plan or convert to CMYK before printing as colours looks differently than when using RGB, but we can speak more about that later.
Stripes
A more critical aspect is resolution and DPI. What resolution you are really designing and printing depends on how high-quality you want the image to be and what kind of limitations your printer has. Owing to the restricted usage of just 4 colour cartridges for printers, the DPI must be significantly greater than the image on the computer such that the more complicated colours can be repeated. When modelling for print, for example, the default DPI (dots per inch) for a magazine or leaflet would typically be 300, so the higher the resolution, the better the picture appears.
Plan for printing
Print-specific architecture is not the same as interactive and web-based architecture, in reality it may be a little complex.

Traditionally, as stated before, when designing for printing, you can use CMYK, and this is still the case when using high end printers. The problematic aspect is that many modern inkjet printers do not necessarily support CMYK data, so though you submit a file to print from photoshop using CMYK colour mode, the printer can transform any data sent over to RGB colour mode. But it is hard for me to tell you what style you are going to be using, since it will be different for each printer you are using.
Setup
Personally, while beginning a new document for printing, I would consider going with RGB in the first stage of the template. The explanations for this are: RGB file sizes are lower, certain philtres and effects do not work because there is a wider colour spectrum in CMYK and RGB. Then, until you are ready to print, move to CMYK if your printer states that CMYK data will be obtained, the only drawback of this is a minor colour loss / change that you would be able to fix.
Now when it comes to setting the DPI, it is pretty easy. 300 DPI would nearly always be as big as you ought to be while modelling for printing. At this size, the human eye can not discriminate between dots from a normal reading point, thus obtaining a better resolution will typically be useless.
If you print anything that is not seen close up, such as a poster or flag, the resolution will be smaller, typically about 150 – 200 DPI is fine. When building anything far bigger that can be seen from a distance, such as a big billboard, it is normal for the resolution to be as low as 12 – 15 DPI.
For any of the bigger prints, you certainly can not print it yourself, so it is still safe to inquire what kind of resolution and colour mode the printer wants.