There are a few printers and printing specialists such as cheap-printing-spain.com who cater for international clients. By using English-speaking printers in Spain it is easier to be sure of obtaining the most cost-effective materials and print processes as nothing is lost in translation.
In today’s climate it is more important than ever to expect great value in your printing. Printing in Spain is no exception. If anything, the opportunity to buy bargain-priced printing is greater with targeted and healthily populated expatriate regions. With printing companies who cater for specific populations, it is more economical to fill printing plates with many customers requiring similar print runs to really reduce the initial setup costs. Often that these savings are then moved to the client resulting in lower prices. For example, a printing supplier in Alicante on the run up to St. Patrick’s Day would have one or two printing plates all filled with promotional vouchers advertising various different bars and restaurants. As you can see, for the cost of one printing plate, the printer will produce several jobs. This then can force the price of printing down to accommodate the requirement.
It is often confused that poor printed output is the fault of the printer. Sometimes this is the case with issues such as colour registration or of course, lack of quality control, but mostly it is down to the resolution and colour levels of the original artwork. It is important to check your final artwork before sending to print. Here follows some of the common errors or oversights that result in a less than average printed output.
If your final output size is to be A5, for example, and you wished that some of the image to run to the edge of the paper then the file that you should give to the printers should contain crop markings defining the A5 image. It is therefore necessary to have the image beyond the crop marks so that a portion of the image is sliced of after the image has been printed. Various printers ask for different bleed distances but the industry standard is to supply a 3mm bleed.
Image resolution is without doubt the number one reason for poor printed output when sending artwork in Spain. Lots of due to problems in communication or lower-rate, lower profit margins, will simply print what is sent whether you have poor resolution or colour or not. So it’s normally up to you check this to be correct. Resolution is something that can be very confusing, even to the most qualified and experienced industry professionals. In short, what looks great on screen doesn’t necessarily mean it will look good on paper. Screen resolution on your monitor is 72 dots per inch and printed media at magazine quality is printed at 300 dpi. This is because colours are made up from four dots – cyan, magenta, yellow and black, whereas your monitor has a single pixel with the exact colour. If this is still all a bit hard to grasp, don’t worry, you’re not on your own but a good rule of thumb is to think that any screen image will print the same quality but a quarter of the size printed. In other words, if you have a nice big full screen image, it will be output on paper to that same quality on paper but only a quarter of the size and maintain that quality. So an image 1200×800 pixels, fills your screen and looks fine, to fill an a4 piece of paper (roughly the same size as your monitor) then your image should ideally be some 4 megapixels.
You should also always check your colour levels before sending to the printer. Another thing to check in your design files is the balance of levels. Remember screens are naturally bright. Photo editing software such as Photoshop will have functions such as auto levels which will automatically optimize the colours, or you can manually adjust them. Many free programs or online versions can also do this now. Here’s a quick popular example… if you had a picture of someone with the sky in the background, you’ll sometimes notice that the face comes out a bit on the dark side because the camera didn’t want to overexpose the sky when taking the photograph. But for the sake of your printing, it is probable that the subject is more important than the sky. Don’t forget that this will show up to be worse on the printed image. Therefore, it’s a good idea to lift the levels of the photo to display the subject and overexpose the sky which will of course go white (i.e no ink on the paper). This doesn’t look quite as bad as an overexposed image on screen where the power of the backlight on the monitor will blind you somewhat.
Another thing to bear in mind, when photos are saved and saved again, each time with a level of compression (such as a jpg) then reduction in quality becomes visible. Sometimes naked to the eye on screen, these can lower the quality and colour density of the printed image. Whereveer you can, find the original highest resolution photo for your artwork. There are also various plugins for popular editing software that automatically removes digital artefacts and noise etc. Remember though – it is ALWAYS best to seek out the highest quality image to start with.
Technology has moved a long way recently and it is now common place to find outlets for printing superb quality documents at very high resolutions in large, medium or very small quantities. Because of the fall in set up costs with the advent of quicker, better, printing equipment it is now possible to receive cheap printing at high qualities. Cheap-printing-spain.com is one example of such a printer in Spain. They optimize the whole printing process through the use of technology and digital and offset printing to suit a client’s particular needs. The result is great value for marketing and advertising through printing. Now, more than ever, we need to watch our marketing budget. A lot of companies are of course retuning budgets to be able to focus more on internet marketing, so every cent spent on Printing services Costa Blanca now counts more than ever.
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