The entire creative design in print doesn’t start and end with the soft copy. As a designer, you have to ensure the design in your head matches the design on screen. Furthermore, you also need to take extra measures to ensure your design on screen matches what comes out in print. This entails a degree of knowledge and know-how of technical aspects of design, the two most important of which are resolution and color value.
Resolution
In a nutshell, the image resolution is how crisp and clear the image is. Measured in a pixel ratio, the higher the ratio is, the better the resolution. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: pixel stands for picture element, the smallest elements of any image. They are the building blocks of everything you see in your monitor. The idea is the more of these pixels there are, the better the image turns out in print.
The catch here is that the resolution on screen and in print are very different. Your monitor can showcase even low resolution images in great quality. But when it comes to print, you need all the extra pixels in every square inch of your print material to make the image quality higher.
Color Value
Now let’s talk about color models. Particularly, the RGB and CMYK color models.
RGB – Red, Green, and Blue is the additive color combination used to show color on monitors. Additive colors come from light sources directly, so it’s not that difficult for your monitor to mix and match the right levels of RGB to mete out good images.
CMYK – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black is the subtractive color combination used in print. Subtractive colors come from light shining off of images. Because printed material can’t emit their own light (and thus can’t mix and match RGB’s) they use values of those four subtractive colors to represent the image printed on them.
Image in RGB versus same image in CMYK.
Almost everything you design on screen follows the RGB color model, unless you specify or adjust the color model manually. When they are printed, short of making the paper luminous, printers have no choice but to use CMYK. Basically, how images look in RGB are markedly different from how they look in CMYK.
Importance of Getting It Right
But isn’t setting the bar too high just nit-picking on what should otherwise be standards auxiliary to the main reason for the print design? No. Resolution and color value are absolutely not auxiliary nor secondary standards or factors.
The clarity of your images and the way your design’s colors show are drastically important. Case in point: research suggests that color advertisements sell 43% better than their black and white counterparts, and they also increase in-depth reading by as much as 60%. Those values alone should be compelling enough for you to get to know your resolution and color value 101’s. Let’s cut this short for now, but in a following post, we’ll delve into practical tips on how to efficiently maximize resolution and color values.
Articles Source: http://www.printcreate.com/
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