Your design looks perfect on screen. Then the printed brochure arrives with cut edges, dull photos and a blue that turned green.
The fault is rarely the printer. It is that a screen file was sent to press. Print needs a different file, with seven checks a normal person can do.
1 · CMYK for print, RGB for screen
Printers use four inks — cyan, magenta, yellow, black. Your screen uses light. A deep blue on screen can print muddy in CMYK. Convert the print file at design stage, not at the shop.
Keep the web PDF in RGB. Two files, two colour spaces, same artwork.
2 · Bleed and crop marks
Bleed is extra artwork at the edge that the printer trims — usually 3 mm on all sides. Without it, white slivers appear on the trim edge. Crop marks show where to cut.
Export with bleed on. The printer will thank you and bill you less.
3 · Fonts embedded, images at press resolution
Outline or embed every font in the print PDF. A font missing on the printer’s machine substitutes silently and destroys the layout.
Images need about 300 dots per inch at final size. A photo that looks sharp on Instagram (72 dpi) prints soft. Use originals, not downloads.
4 · Proof the sample, not the screen
Send the printer one physical proof before the full run, especially for product colour. Compare the proof with the real product in daylight. If the blue is wrong, fix the file now — not after 2,000 copies.
The preflight checklist
- CMYK print file exported with 3 mm bleed and crop marks.
- All fonts embedded; images 300 dpi at size.
- Physical proof approved against the real sample.
- Press PDF and web PDF exported from the same source.
- Source files and both PDFs stored in your name.
Do that and the brochure that arrives matches the one you approved — and the reprint a year later matches it too.
Sources
The official pages this guide is based on:
