The Madison Adobe User Group (MAUG) was delighted to have James Wamser join us at our first meeting of 2024, on April 23! James is an Adobe Certified Expert, part of the Customer Education team at Walsworth (a commercial printer), and a long-time instructor at technical colleges in the Milwaukee area. Bringing along some nice Walsworth swag as well as excellent finished print examples to illustrate his advice, he also shared several online resources that help designers set up and produce files that will pass press preflight checks with flying colors. In James's words, "Getting it Right, Right from the Start."
We discussed the following tips and tricks:
Layout
- Build your document exactly to the final trim size with ⅛” (0.125”) margins and bleeds.
- InDesign can do the math for you! (Example: “8.5in-⅛” typed into a size box will change to 8.375in when you submit it.)
- Find or ask for a template to any item that folds or for perfect bound covers/spine to account for folds, safe zones, and creep.
- Ask your printer for PDF Export settings (which can be imported to InDesign in the File menu), as they may each have different requirements.
- Use the InDesign Page Tool to set up perfect bound covers as three adjoining pages rather than one big document with guides.
- This also means you can export this as a spread and it will have all of the crop marks on it, unlike a single wide page layout where you use guides!
- It also makes it possible to easily export separate files of covers and spines to be used in marketing materials.
- Set up a 3-page document (no facing pages, add your bleed and margin and set pages to the final trim size), use the Page tool and Properties panel to resize page two to the spine width provided by your printer, uncheck “Allow Document Pages to Shuffle” in the side menu of the Pages panel, and drag them to line up next to each other:
- For perfect bound covers, note that on the front and back, the cover needs to be glued to the pages for structural integrity – this is called a “glue margin” or “glue spill” and the size of it depends on the finishing equipment that your printer has.
- If you have imagery or design elements going across the inside front or back spreads, you need to know the size of the glue spill and create a crossover layout to have the elements appear to align perfectly.
Color and Images
- CMYK document color space and colors/swatches with no spot colors other than those ordered with the print job
- For small black text, be sure you are using just the black swatch, not registration or a rich black
- Don’t use the registration swatch inside the trim area
- While RGB images are acceptable, editing them to be CMYK and making sure color quality and intensity isn’t lost in the color conversion is a smart step
- The Preflight panel can be set to detect color space for all links and swatches
- 200ppi effective resolution after scaling images are sufficient in most circumstances
- Expand the bottom of your InDesign links panel and check the Effective PPI number
- Add image resolution to your preflight checks in InDesign and/or Acrobat
Check out the entire library of Quick Start Guides that James made for Walsworth customers for even more great information: https://www.walsworth.com/quick-start
Having trouble between versions of Adobe software? James has created documents that track the arrival, departure, and major changes of features in InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator to help you navigate those changes.Finally, James collaborated with some big Adobe names to produce posters of all the most-used keyboard shortcuts! Mac on one side, PC on the other. You’ll have to come to future meetings in order to get your free first-come-first-served copy, and the best way to be informed about that is to sign up for our email list! See you then!
