For Printing at Image Science

Please take care to supply us with files suitable for making high quality prints. 

This page has comprehensive notes on preparing your files. 
We have another page with notes about actually sending us your files.
See also our ICC profiles for soft proofing (if you have solid experience with these - Colour and Black and White).

We have two basic types of prints:

• Standard sheet sizes - A4, A3, A3+ and A2.
  
• Roll Prints for anything larger - we use a 24 inch or 44 inch roll and price on a per-5-running-inch basis.

Jump to:

• General notes on File Formats and Resolutions
• Preparing files for Sheet Prints (includes Printable Areas for Sheet Prints)
• Preparing files for Roll Prints (on 24 or 44 inch rolls)
• Special Notes on Preparing Black & White Files
• A Picture to Guide You...

General Notes on File Formats and Resolutions

Please note: If you do not prepare your files correctly per the instructions below, we will contact you and ask you to re-prepare the files correctly.  This will of course cause a significant delay.

Our entire print service pricing is structured around you supplying completely print ready files which are sent directly to the printer. If we need to do file preparation work for you, this is charged at $80/hour and please provide very clear instructions.

We print your image as it comes without alteration. Specifically this means you must size your image correctly in Photoshop, on a canvas of the size print you have requested.

• Please flatten all layers
• Please supply your files as  colour space tagged RGB TIFF files
  (8 or 16 bit, any RGB colour space you choose such as sRGB, AdobeRGB, ProPhoto etc).
  
• We will also reluctantly accept high quality JPG, PDF and PSD but note these last two may cause arcane technical issues (wrong print sizes for example) and/or delays with your orders and we can't accept responsibility for this (i.e. we will charge you for the print even if it comes out the wrong size as you can instead supply a proper TIFF file as we request) - fully rendered TIFFs are the best way to submit files - this is a non proprietary, standardised format easily read and created by almost every imaging application available in the world today.
• We will not accept vector formats like .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files.
• We will not accept CMYK formats (or 'Dot Gain' etc).
  
• Create a canvas that is the appropriate size (A4 or A3 for sheet prints, or 24/44 inches wide by the length you want for roll prints) and lay your image(s) out on that canvas at the size you want
• Stay within the printable areas (see below)!
• Please supply files at 360 PPI if possible (any multiple of 30 from 180 to 720 is acceptable, though).
• We respect all ICC profiles, please make sure you send us your files correctly tagged with a colour space - please do NOT convert your files into our print profiles, just send them in Adobe RGB or whatever you use, our system will do the conversion here
• If you send us an untagged file, we will assume the file is in sRGB (i.e. we will 'Assign sRGB' in Photoshop).

Preparing files for Sheet Prints

Make sure you check the paper availability table to make sure the paper you want is available at the size you want. 

Please note if you are getting sheet prints done, your image must fit in the printable page area or it will be automatically sized down to fit. Our printers can NOT print full bleed on sheets - If you need require bleed prints (i.e. to the paper edge), you will need to go up a size and then trim the prints down, or get roll prints done, and trim to size.

• The printable area for A2 is 22 by 16 inches (55.8 by 40.6cm)
  
• The printable area for A3+ is 18 by 12 inches (45.7 by 30.4cm)
  
• The printable area for A3 is 15.4 by 11.4 inches (39.1 by 28.9cm)
  
• The printable area for A4 is 10.5 by 8 inches (26.6 by 20.3cm)
• You can download templates (in PSD form) with guides set up for you here.
  
• IN ALL CASES IF YOUR IMAGE IS SUPPLIED TOO LARGE, WE WILL AUTOMATICALLY RESIZE IT TO FIT THE PAGE

Preparing files for Roll Prints

Please Note: We strongly recommend you leave at least one inch of white space all around your image.

If you prepare your files as full bleed to 24" or 44", we can NOT guarantee the outside centimetre or so of paper will be 100% free of minor imperfections like small ink marks etc. If you choose to prepare full bleed files we will print them as such, but imperfections that result are at your own risk.

If you want prints larger than standard A2, you will need to use our roll printing service. You can choose prints on either 24 inch rolls or 44 inch rolls.

Simply supply us with any document up to 24 or 44 inches (by any length) in size, as per the general notes above, and we'll take care of the rest. Make sure you include any necessary whitespace in your canvas adn we recommend at least one inch of whitespace all around.

You can also use our roll printing service to print many smaller images, laid out on to a single page. Create a new document that is 24 or 44 inches by the length you need, and lay out your smaller images on this sheet in any way that works for you, remembering to leave needed white space around each image if required.

Please be aware that print perfection and absolute perfect alignment at the very edges of the roll is impossible with heavy fine art materials. Slight marks and/or skewing of the print on the page may occur, and therefore some final trimming of your print may be necessary (it's usually not more than a few millimetres). If in doubt, leave a 1 inch around the edges of your images on your print layouts.

Special Notes On Preparing Black and White Files

If sending us true black and white files, please make this explicit - best of all is to put something in the filename to indicate true black and white files. This is because we use a special mode to print true black and white files.  Please do NOT supply in a so called 'greyscale' colour space - supply as neutral RGB files.

While we try and detect this by checking all RGB values are the same in a file, if we are not made explicitly aware that a file is true black and white, then we may inadvertently print this using a colour mode.  Results will still be very good, but the best black and whites do come from this specialist mode.

A Picture To Guide You....

Say you are setting up a file for an A3 print.  It should end up looking like this (thanks to Jody Pratt for the lovely illustration).  The blue lines are Photoshop guide lines and would not print, of course.