Slightly Pixilated/Blurry Flyer

[kahlie]

Hey People,

I was wondering if somebody could help. I designed a quick flyer. Although "designed". I'm using several free fonts and wingbats. I don't have time for graphics, and they needed it within the week. Plus that they wanted to have it only black and white.

It's supposed to be A4 format, so I used GIMP for the exact size and moved stuff around a bit. I decided upon .jpeg format, because I thought it would look clear enough. (At least, on screen it does). Currently my printer is out of commission, so I asked somebody to print it.

I was rather disappointed with the printed result. You can see some pixilated/blurry effects that make it look like there was a haze layer put over it...

Can anybody tell me what the best thing to do is? I could manually clean all the greytones leaving it only black and white, but I doubt it's worth the trouble and amount of work. I wondered if I shouldn't switch to another format... Somebody suggested making it much bigger and then scaling it down, but quite frankly, I'm not that impressed with Photoshop or GIMP's scaling methods...

Any Help?

Kahlie

[sypher]

Print work is different to normal graphics. They need to be a much higher resolution.

For example, artwork should be 3-4 times bigger than the actual work, therefore it captures alot of detail, dont just work straight off of A4 because it will turn out as you have seen.

In photoshop it is Image > Image Size - Then increase the resolution by triple.

P.S. the format mostly used by the print companies is PDF and TIFF

[kahlie]

Hey Sypher,

Thanks for the tip. The problem is, if I make it 3-4 times bigger, it has to be resized... What is the best way to resize? I think resizing in GIMP sucks, even on cubic...

Kahlie

Time to start up Photoshop again

[Rob]

Resizing down is seldom a problem.... resizing up however will tend to suck in any application unless you are dealing with vector graphics..... which brings me to the next point.... consider re-doing the graphic in vector?

[sypher]

Just resize it down with the graphics program such as photoshop? :O There shouldnt be any problem there. GIMP isnt exactly the best tool for this kind of work.

As rob said consider doing it in vector so there will be no pixelation.

[kahlie]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the reactions
Right now on the top of my head, I don't know any vector based proggie that I have here in Holland. I used to have Adobe Illustrator, but I can't for the life of me find my CD. (Distinct disadvantage of having 2 homes in 2 countries...)
Any free programs that are easy to download around that I'm not aware of?

Think it's really that benificial to change to Vector-Based Graphics? It's only a stupid flyer for a Community Centre after all...

Kahlie

[sypher]

Well if the original image is big enough then you wont see the pixelation when scaled down and printed out.

[digi-phil]

I have worked in the print industry for about 7 years and here's how it goes, the original pixel image i.e photographic image needs to be about 30mb per square metre for a 300dpi printer which is about standard, if you have a larger image then the better, remember you can always scale down but not up unless it is in vector format, if you have an image which is below standard you cannot put it into photoshop and add pixels to it i.e res it up, the image will become blurry because if you add pixels to solid lines they become gradients, as a rule all text and logos should be vector graphics for clear definition, all images should have very little compression as this reduces the image quality. try a high resolution pfd format to print from and see if that has a better result.