Re: Outputting Your Input: Printing Tips 'n' Techniques

[Gare]

This is a maiden launch of a thread I'd like to see grow into a discussion on our forum about printing. Print is not dead and everyone needs to keep current with existing and emerging technologies. Perhpas this should be a blog, but for the moment, if you'd like to help build sort of a Wikepedia here on PDF, please feel free to contribute Qs and As on printing: basics as well as advanced techniques are all welcome.

I'll go first:

Unless you have years of experience—up-to-date-experience—with process and spot printing, or if you yourself have worked at a print house or service bureau, I don't recommend that you spec your print job by yourself. Bringing the work you envision on your monitor working in Photoshop or other design app to the printed page is at best a collaborative effort between you the designer and the person who operates, services and maintains a commercial press. This is similar to driving someone else's care; you might have a general idea of where the steering wheel and the brake is, but what fuel does it run best on, how does it handle curves, did you notice what brand of tires this friend's car has, and similar questions arise that have an impact on your driving experience.

Similarly, you probably don't have a good idea of what a commercial press's dot-gain is, which changes over time and forget Adobe's "standard" recommendation of 20% for blacks and such—print presses are as unique as people. Undercolor removal (UCR), line frequency, resolution, type of ink response to paper...these are all considerations you need to discuss with an experienced pressman before you put the final touches on your design. My recommendation is to make friends with a pressman at a commerical house, bring donuts and chat, perhaps offer a barter of your design services in exchange for rush jobs or special attention to a particularly thorny print...and then remain friends with them. It's a pain in the neck to get a working relationship going with a commercial print place and then spuriously change vendors, mostly because you've lost your quality equity and have to begin the process again to get your specs in synch with the new house's specs.

The first thing you'll want to do is to get a copy of the print profile your house uses; they're small files that go in your system's color folder and a good house will be happy to email you the file. By doing this, applications such as Photoshop can take the file and you can adjust your monitor to the profile so What You See is Remotely Close to What you Print. Color consistency is a big topic I'll try to discuss in future posts (again, everyone is welcome to chime in), but right now I'd like to touch on a few definitions, terms you need to know to ensure your experience with a commercial printer is as trauma-free as possible.

You know the page size in your applications; the border inside the pasteboard? Usually, we call that the live area; your design in toto should fit in there, but you'll need to design some extra, perhaps superfluous stuff outside of the page when you intend to print something called a bleed design. Why? Because unless you float your design on a page, keeping all areas well within the printable page, your page never prints clear to the edge because commercial presses and even home inkjets and laserjets use grippers to feed tthe page of paper through the rollers. To get a design that bleeds to the edge of the finished printed page—so you don't have (uneven) white edges surrounding your work, there are three terms you should get to know:

•Bleed-This term describes the total area of your design, and not the total area of your design. So if a pressman tells you, "The magazine's trim size is 8½ by 11. This is a verso page in the magazine; I need 1/2 bleed on the outside with 1" bleed on the binding side", what they are saying in English is, "The design you did is going on the right side of a magazine that is trimmed to 8½" by 11". So extend or calculate cropping in your full page design so that it's 9½" wide and 12½" tall, with the important part of your design toward the right side because the binding of the magazine is on the left so horizontally you're going to have more cropped off the left than the right."

Bleed is a reality of life you really can't cheat. You want your design to go clear to the edge of the printed page? Then you have to, from the concept of your design, engineer some superfluous room around the edges that your pressman specs out, room that will be trimmed off after printing the piece.

• Trim-Trim is the size of your finished print. If the trimmed page is 8½" by 11" and you want your design to go clear to the edge of the finished page, you must design in bleed area to your design. Trim size is not bleed size; see Bleed above.

• Live area-The live area of your finished, trimmed, printed design is the area your audience will see. The live area is the design area to which your printed design is trimmed. The live area is not the bleed size. Commercial printers don't use the term often, instead they tell you what the trim size is, so from a production point of view, live and trim sizes are synonymous. But from a designer's point of view, "live area" is the important part of your design you want your audience to see, while trim size is the pressman's term for what the finished page looks like after trimming away the bleed area. So in my illustration below, I engineered some "padding" into my design so my live area is smaller than the specified trim size; the result is that I decide, not the print press, what is visually important and what gets trimmed out after printing.

Below is the design I did with trim, live, and bleed indicated. And I've deliberately made a mistake here. You can see that there's probably too little distance between my bleed and my live area. The result if I sent this to be printed is that there will be an uneven sliver of white at the bottom of the printed page. This is if the commercial printer is good and makes a judgment call I should have made as a designer, and they reduce the graphic so it fits properly on the page. Alternatively, they could "float" the graphic, which is a somewhat Byzantine term meaning that just flop the deisgn on the page, possible letting the trim size fall smaller than the bleed margins and the result is that more of your design is cropped out while trimming to accomodate the bleed specifications. And you probably won't be happy to have some of your design cropped away just because you didn't build enough bleed into the outside of your design.

So:

1.) Talk to your pressman before finishing your design. Better still, talk to the pressman 3 mintures after you have a concept and way before you design the sucker in your design application.

2.) Set up your guidelines and page size in your application to accomodate the bleed and trim your pressman tells you. I'm using values in this discussion that are totally arbitrary; some presses need ½", while others have paper grippers that'll only need 3/8" or less.

3.) You do not drop off a file at a commercial press with, "Can you print me some copies?"! Calibrate your monitor so you can soft proof your design onscreen using the print profile you get from a press, work with their specs and not against them, and you'll be satisfied with the finished piece. When you have a print job, it's your responsibility to deliever a file that is both artistically excellent and conforms to what the print shop needs to realize your work.

Then spring for donuts and mention the print shop to friends. Commercial press places appreciate mindshare as much as you do!

My Best,

Gare

[Gare]

I wrote an article for the Xara Xone a few months ago that's available as a PDF download in our Autumn Reading Section; it's on color, a topic that's not as intuitive to grasp as particle physics but simpler than tying your shoes. I'm not a color guru like Bruce Fraser, but what I have to share is good working knowledge stuff, and I do document the fundamental difference between additive color models such as RGB and the subtractive color model of CMY(K). Your print work will go more predictable if you understand the relationships between digital and physical color spaces.

I also tease apart the difference between color spaces and color models. In a nutshell, color spaces define the extent to which the spectrum of color can be represented, while color models are used to describe specific values to co-workers and to applications.

My Best,

Gare

[Gare]

Before we ever got into this computer graphics “what is the resolution?” jazz, we were experiencing the phenomenon of image resolution from the moment we opened out eyes as infants. The human eye uses resolution that scientists call granularity; there are a finite number of photo-receptors in our eyes, and then our brain assembles the “grains” of image data from our photo-receptors into recognizable shapes. A friend of ours didn’t understand resolution from a physical aspect, and although his comments about his 1200 dpi laserjet provided a chuckle, he expressed this granularity idea very practically. He said, “this is a really good print; you can’t see the dots!”. True; the granularity of our eyes makes a smooth continuous tone from a printed halftone whose resolution is greater than our eyes’ resolution when held at arm’s length.

Pixels
Okay, to bring resolution down to its elemental level, let’s define a pixel. The term “pixel” is a combination of the words “picture element.” A pixel is a placeholder for a specific color at a specific point in a digital image. As such, a pixel has no fixed measurement. It’s sort of like oranges: oranges come in different sizes, and to ask how many oranges in a crate depends entirely on the size of the oranges. You cannot measure the size of a pixel unless the pixel is placed within the context of resolution, which is a fractional value: how many pixels per inch or per centimeter is the overall image? Usually, we view pixels on a monitor at a screen resolution of 72 pixels per inch and this pixel size is small enough that we ignore individual pixels and instead concentrate on the image that all the pixels are making up.

A pixel-based image is made up of a finite number of picture elements—that’s why we call bitmaps “resolution dependent” images.

Resolution

Counting an image in pixels is fine for the Web, where JPEG and GIF images are expressed in dimensions by pixels (because your monitor displays everything using pixels). But when you have to print a piece that is 5 inches wide, for example, you need a different system of measurement. This is because printers have a fixed capability to reproduce your artwork as dots. Enter the phrase resolution.

Image resolution is defined as an amount, expressed as a fraction (a ratio). For example, viewing resolution is the apparent closeness of an image. When you zoom into an image in Photoshop, and you’ve zoomed 200%, your viewing resolution is 2:1. The resolution of scanners is expressed in samples/inch (an unencoded stream that is converted to pixels/inch by your host application), that of screen images in pixels/inch, and that of printers in dots/inch. Image dimensions are directly affected by resolution, as is image quality.

When an image is resolution dependent, as are pixel-based images, the size of the pixels, the height, and the width of a bitmap image are fixed. You can’t change any of these parameters of an image without degrading the image’s quality or otherwise distorting it.

The only way to make a resolution-dependent bitmap image larger or smaller as expressed in inches is to change the resolution. There’s a law here:

Image resolution is inversely proportional to image size (expressed in real world units).

For example, an image that is 1”by 1” by 300 pixels/inch can also be expressed as an image that’s 2”by 2”by 150 pixels per inch. You increase the dimensions, and you must decrease the resolution. By doing this, you ensure that not one pixel of information is changed. And no resizing of the image has happened. If you change size or resolution while holding the other value constant, you change the content of the image, and it’s usually visible. And ugly.

I’ll talk about the best printing resolutions and how pixels per inch translates to dots per inch in a post to follow soon.

My Best,

Gare

[Gare]

Thanks Gare. This is a pretty concise bit of info and I'm going to bookmark it and pass it on in some other forums. As you may (or may not) know, I do quite a bit of freelance pre-press work. I have a couple of fairly large and busy printers I work with. I pre-flight with Acrobat 7 and Pitstop 7. I think I'll post a screen shot of a PDF report to show what a mess some of the files I deal with on a regular basis, that are submitted by legit designers, actually look like (technically) Everything you'll see on the report has to be addressed before printing. Then, of course, there are the other issues such as dates and grammer that can only be snagged by physically examining the doc ( something that you would think would be addressed prior to sending the doc to print, by the designer). Most of the issues are simply the result of sloppy work and/or work habits. RE: setting up a correct date and folio line in a template. Distilling postscripts using the printers pdf profiles, working in cmy(k) color space. adjusting photos prior to placing them into the page layout program. Proper embedding of fonts {in particular, ding-bats} and even making the effort to pre-flight the doc before dumping it on the 'ol FTP site and heading off to Starbucks before it even clears the Pitstop Server. I work with quite a few designers and I estimate that only 10% submit files that run through smoothly. The other 90% are pure junk...and as much as I've tried to guide them through the problems ( mostly alternative color space, low rez, 4/c black text and black text knocking out of backgrounds ) The same issues occur month after month. They simply don't know how to, or won't, learn. Ergo, I'm a bit jaded where it concerns the abilities of 'most' designers. They are creative, I'll give them that, but there's a hell of a lot of iceberg under the waterline.

[Gare]

I'd like to also reinforce the idea that the hipper print shops are moving big-time to PDFs as the preferred delivery system for output. A Quark document is not a guarantee; take a look inside a FedEx/Kinko's the next time you need a "one of" (not a long R.O.P.)--as workstations are upgraded, they're using InDesign as a front end, I'm seeing.

But PDFs are portable,l platform-indpendent, and if you got your color destinations set up right, they should be fairly buttlet-proof. Again, InDesign is a good engine for producing PDFs because the preflight features are tested and really quite good, and increasingly Adobe Systems is growing some fantastically well-integrated apps. Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign are indeed a Creative Suite, but moreover, they play nice together.

-g-

[ronmatt]

Actually Gare, although you may expect Adobe apps to produce great PDF's, ( seeing how Adobe invented PDF's) they don't. The best PDF is made in Acrobat Distiller. Adobe PDF's are made in In Design and Illustrator and Photoshop PDF's in PS. Neither of which properly embed. RIP's tend to flush Adobe PDF's. and Preps ( the most used Imposition software ) many times won't even recognise them. Jaws also makes a better PDF than Adobe.

[Gare]

Adobe is a funny company, Ron, not "ha ha" funny so much as "my alarm clock is flashing !2:00" funny...Sometimes they make really slow and wide turns, while other times they're right on top of stuff. PostScript technology (PS as we shorthand the term) has been around sinct the birth of the laser printer; John Warnock wrote a seminal work on the proposed technology back in '85 I think, the original purpose being a portable page description language. It's such a widely accepted idea and paradigm today that the founder of PIXAR once said that they want RenderMan to be the PostScript of the modeling language; and it is.

But PostScript and PDF (the Acrobat Portable Document Format) are mingling together; PDF is one of the default file formats for Illustrator, and I'm not sure whether Adobe is phasing out PS as we've known it, merging it with PDF, or PDF is slowly embracing PostScript to include it. Or perhaps PDF is yet another flavor of PostScript at its core.

In any event, you're the resident pro on pre-flight, not me. I intensively dabble . Care to share any thoughts/comments/advice on PDF? It comes in several iterations such as PDF/X and now 3D PDF; additionally, just about every program can write a PDF without Distiller. I'm guessing by your last post, that some PDF implementations work fine while others barf a printer.

I had the good fortune once to get a small job done by S & T Printing, the place in Carolina that does the National Geographic (no flies on them!); they took my PageMaker file with EPS files embedded, graphics linked and the fonts I used, and then they converted the whole shebang to Creo-Scitex format. The job went fine, but my point is that pre-press can sometimes be a lot to grasp and deal with for today's designer. Too much? No; sitting at Starbucks is just being negligent. And that's why I sorta turn to PDF as a deliver package—there's less to overlook.

Can you point out a pitfall or two for those of us who lean more toward design, less toward the production pipeline?

TIA,

Gare

[ronmatt]

There actually are very few pitfalls Gare, providing the designer simply applies the things you so aptly pointed out. It isn't rocket science either. Take me for example. I too lean toward design and illustration, but after being awoken so many times in the middle of the night by some pre-press techy and being told that my files were flushing and in order to keep on the press schedule, I'd have to fix them NOW!, I decided to learn what these guys were doing. I had no idea what Acrobat was to be used for or even that there was a more advanced Acrobat version than Reader. So I arranged to sit in at one of the printers I work with and learn the in and outs of Pre-Press. At that time we were still providing native files with all the fonts and images linked. There was no In Design, just Quark and Pagemaker.........(sorry, just thinking of Pagemaker makes me queezy)...... By the time PDF's started I was quite familiar with pre-press issues and was able to ease into the new file format without a hitch. I ended up learning the pre-press thing, as well as, if not better than the techs.
The best way to explain them( I think ) would be to compare them to 'conventional stripping'. Back in the day, design was done on artboards with tissue overlays that attempted to illustrate how a final page (s) should look. These boards were photographed on a high contrast film and a 'stripper' would assemble the negatives on a light table along with asundry film positives, shrinks and spreads and mechanical screen tints. One set of negs per color. Color separations were made as 'loose' color and stripped into the masks created by the stripper. They were registered by eye, using a loop. These carriers were then optically assembled onto a printing plate. Usually each plate per color was the result of many 'individual' exposures. 1 for line work, 1 for the color separation, 1 for screens etc. ( this is very over simplified ) But in a fashion is was a bit like 'native files'
Many of the more progressive printers assembled the parts onto a piece of film prior to plating. This film assembly was called 'composite stripping'. There were many 'color trade shops' whose only product was 'loose color separations' and composite stripped film that were used for multiple copies of ads that were sent to various printers, mostly publications. These companies staffed the more highly skilled strippers and paid the best wage. This 'composite' film would be akin to PDF's.
Todays designer is charged with the job of stripping. They must prepare a digital file in the PDF format that is acurate and press ready. Todays pre-press's job is to process these pdf's and impose them into a press configuration. When the designer fails on their end, the pre-press tech must have a working knowledge of each and every application used to make the file in order to correct the pdf. The riff between pre-press and design stems from the fact that designers who provide incorrect files are viewed by pre-press as incompetent It's irrelevant how clever the design is. Designers think that pre-press techs are left brain monkeys that lack any creative ability.
As to the actual PDF itself. The distiller settings can be provided by 'most' printers that are particular to their workflow configs. Simply place them in your distiller settings folder and choose them when processing postscripts for that printer. Those profiles will set the postscript and pdf levels required for them. The designer really doesn't need to do much more. If the printer has no settings, then by default use 'quality printing'. If you don't have Acrobat with Distiller, you should sacrafice that ski weekend and get it. It's really quite essential for making correct pdf's.
I also think that if Adobe were to phaze out Postscript, it would have a tremendous fiscal effect on the industry that would shake it's very foundations. Enfocus, Kodak, Quite and Epson, The plate setting mfg's Everyone would be in a tailspin.

[Gare]

Ever wonder what "Rendering Intent" is in Photoshop, vista, and other design apps?

Here are some useful steps to calibration and a little more consistency between what you see and what you get from your home inkjet:

1. Calibrate everything you own before you design, and even before you have a concept for a design. Use the Adobe Gamma Panel utility (Win) or Apple’s Color Sync (Mac) if you’re on a budget. Some calibration is better than none. If you have some spare change, send it to The Boutons, or more selfishly buy some hardware calibration. PANTONE is the hippest so far, because they offer flat panel in addition to CRT calibrators. Barco is an industry standard, but it costs $$$. But generally, if you’re a printing type of dude or dudette, you owe it to your career to take measures to ensure color consistency between your idea, the screen, and the printed page.

I personally and professionally detest the sRGB color space; just because it’s W3 compliant doesn’t mean the WWW consortium knows diddly about color or color spaces from a professional artist’s perspective. But H-P and Microsoft have driven this narrow color space home and now scanners and inkjets are increasingly hard-wired to sRGB color space, so you’re more assured of color consistency if you use this profile in Photoshop in combination with an sRGB color inkjet.

2. I think I’ve printed a vector design twice in my life, instead printing bitmap renders from modeling apps, but color conversion might be of use to you and other members. In Photoshop, you want to set up the Color Settings on the Edit menu to your desired target color space, but also click the Advanced Options button. Use the Adobe Color Engine (ACE) for converting imported files to a destination color space, using the Perceptual Intent option. The Adobe engine is based on the device-independent LAB color space so your conversions are happening in a very wide color space with no discernable clipping. Rendering Intent is a Byzantine term. A rendering intent determines how colors are represented when changing from one device (and consequently, color space) to another. You can think of rendering intent as a style of rendering colors. Here’s how it goes with most applications that understand color profiling (tagging so the host application understands your directions on how the display should map the design’s colors):

Perceptual rendering intent is best for photographic image conversions between color spaces. When colors are converted from one device's color space to another, the relationship between colors is maintained, so perceptually, all the image or design areas keep a relationship that has fidelity when you look at ‘em.

Absolute Colorimetric is best used to simulate paper, and should be the last conversion stage when making page proofs where you want to represent the paper color in the output. Absolute colorimetric intent differs from relative colorimetric intent in that white in the source color space is not mapped to white in the destination color space.

Relative Colorimetric is the best intent when a few specific colors must be matched exactly, such as when rendering logo graphics, so Nitro, this might be your best conversion intent. This is also the best choice for the last transformation stage in print previews. The colors that fall within the allowable color space of both the viewing and printing devices are left unchanged, but other colors may change, resulting in compressed color tone, producing some contrast. The relative colorimetric rendering intent will map white from the source device color space to white in the destination device color space.

Saturation intent is sort of intended (no pun) for the Web and business graphics in which vividness is more important than realistic color, like charts and graphs. When colors are converted from one device's color space to another, the relative hue is maintained, but colors will most certainly shift.

3. So in Photoshop with a bitmap of the graphic you want to print, you try to avoid out-of-gamut (unprintable) colors. Colors in your design that fall out of an inkjet’s color space are clipped to the next printable color, the process is arbitrary and you most certainly won’t be happy with the results. You could also get puddling in your prints due to the inkjet trying to print an unprintable color using its available inks. The remedy lies in soft-proofing. Go to View-->Print Preview and then choose View-->Gamut Warning. Gamut Warning puts a tinted overlay on your image where areas that cannot be printed faithfully occur. The color of the tint is set up in Preferences (Ctrl/cmd+K). A common thing to do is to then choose the Sponge tool in Desaturate mode and scrub over these problem areas until the Gamut Warning blotches disappear. You might not even notice a difference onscreen, but then again our monitors have different color spaces than inkjets—you will indeed notice the difference when you print.

My Best,

Gare

[Gare]

If you're a Windows user, you might want to define a gamma as a profile you use with other Adobe apps, apps that "speak" Adobe gamma, and your printer. But ya can't always find the thing.

Here's how it goes: Adobe Gamma Loader should be in your Windows Control Panel, but I and other users have not found it there, contrary to Adobe documentation. so browse to...

C (or whatever your boot drive is lettered):\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Calibration It's named Adobe Gamma.cpl. You should probably right-click+drag a shortcut to your desktop. Bear in mind that it loads on startup, but some programs don't use it, blowing inter-application color consistency. Adobe products do use it, however, so you're probalby all set. And if you use it, do not use any other 3rd party color calibrator because then they get into a fight, one trying to calibrate the others' calibration...and you lose.

1. Double-click it to load it and then use the Step by Step wizard because it's just easier and provides identical results to the manual option.

2. Give your profile a unique name such as "My first try" and then move on through the wizard steps.

3. When you're done, accept the default location for the saved icc profile and give it a file name. Quit the utility; it'll still be running, like the old TSRs in DOS and earlier versions of Windows, and whatever one calls the Mac OS Startup panels.

4. Go to your drawing program (illustrator, right?), and then go to Edit-->Color Settings.

5. Settings, choose Custom from the drop-down and then Working Spaces=Your color profile you named and saved in Step 3.

If I listed this right and you're a windows user, you're in business and your prints should come out better. Just keep in mind what I wrote about sRGB, only print one small copy from your inkjet with your new color-matching system in place, and if you're unhappy, try sRGB throughout the imaging pipeline.

My Best,

Gary

[Welles]

A site which I've used to great benefit when learning about printing from Photoshop to inkjet printers is...

http://www.gballard.net/psd.html

G. Ballard is one of the long time participants in the Adobe Photoshop Mac forum and has gained considerable regard for the quality of his answers. While the site is somewhat Mac-centric and totally Photoshop oriented it is valuable for anybody learning about a color managed workflow. Some years ago another Adobe Photoshop forum regular was Richard Rose who owned a high quality printing company in Florida. For years his was the 'voice of authority' on that forum about commercial printing issues. At one point he became so frustrated with the confusion of LPI and DPI that he wrote a somewhat lengthy piece about the issue. I was given permission to pass it along. Unfortunately Mr. Rose didn't believe in paragraphs, you'll note, but the information is fascinating none the less.

[Gare]

Thanks for the link, Welles!

To add my own 2¢:

Commercial printing and home inkjet printing are two entirely different animals and you play by different rules. I’ll post the equations when I get a moment, but basically if you need to print and get your own cards out by the 25th, here’s some hard and fast rules:

• I spoke with an Epson techie and here’s the deal: gauge your bitmap files to 225 pixels/inch. Inkjets don’t work according to any “dots per inch rule” because they lay down splats of ink, not precise digital halftone dots. The magic 225 ppi number is because Epson tells me that you go by about 1/3rd the true inkjet resolution, not the enhanced, interpolated resolution. Therefore, say you own a 600 x 1200 enhanced inkjet; you use the smaller of the two numbers—600 splats/inch, divide by 3 and you get 200 splats/inch… then you fudge up for good measure to 225. I’ve tried it and I see no difference between printing a 300 ppi image and a 225 ppi one to an inkjet.

• This means set up your page to: 2475 pixels by 1913 pixels for a standard 8½" by 11" sheet of paper.

• To make it simpler, I’ve attached a zip file with two PDF files you can open in Photoshop or Illustrator—In Photoshop, open the files to 225 pixel/inch. I’ve included trim sizes in the files (in case you want your images flush with the card size), as well as bleed areas and if you want a card to have a 1/8” white border on all sides of the front side, I’ve put rules in there, too. These are for #10 cards and 5 by 7s. As far as envelopes go, you just buy #10 envelopes for one template and half-page envelopes for the 5 by 7 guys.

Okay, to complete the process, if you're going flush with your cards, you'll need to trim them. Go to the art supply store if you don't own these goodies yet, or if you're at work, borrow them from the bullpen:

• A 14" metal ruler that you clean with isopropyl alcohol or Windex to get leftovers off of it. Run your finger over it before you buy it to see that there aren't any dings on the edge.

• A self-healing matte; they're about $6 at a fabric store, cheaper than the art stores. You don't want to use cardboard as your cutting surface because after trimming three cards, the cuts in the cardboard will misguide future cutting.

• An X-Acto blade and knife, or an Olfa disposable blade cutting utility (I like 'em better because you can't lose your spare blades, you just snap off the dulls ones and they cost about 1/3rd what genuine X-Actos cost).

Trim several cards to dull the blade a little. Then score them using the dulled blade. Scoring by hand is an art--you have to exert just the right pressure not to cut the spine of the card! I recommend that you practice to get the feel on some of the trim scraps before doing this. After cutting my own cards for over ten years, I still average one or two "Crap! I scored too hard and cut the card!" guys out of 80 or so.

Merry, Merry,

Gare

[NitroButler]

I've found these video tutes for color management. http://www.photoworkshop.com/adobe/softwarecinema/eddie_tapp_01.html