Providing print-ready images

Standard editing by Redipix.com

Standard editing of your images by a Photoshop professional is included in our regular print prices.  This includes a wide range of editing such as preparing for the sides of your gallery wrap, red-eye correction, brightness/contrast adjustments, conversion to black and white, noise reduction, upsizing, and sharpening.

If you are a professional and have experience with Photoshop and want to do all this preparation yourself, you can obtain a wholesale discount. Below we specify our requirements for providing print-ready images in order to qualify for the discount. The amount of this discount is negotiable along with the wholesale discount.

Color management

As we explain on our color management page, all monitors and printers need to be calibrated and profiled to obtain predictable colors and brightness/contrast on the print. For example, if your monitor is set to a brightness that is higher than standard, an image that looks good to you on your monitor will print too dark. Even if your monitor is color managed, it takes experience to obtain good prints because the monitor has a higher dynamic range than prints. Therefore we highly recommend that you calibrate and profile your monitor and also calibrate and profile your printer so you can make small test prints of an image before submitting it to us for printing. In addition, you should view proof colors in Photoshop using the printing profiles for our ink and paper. How to do all this is explained on our color management page.

Requirements for image files submitted for printing

• File type must be flattened tiff (.tif) or full quality jpeg (.jpg). There is a loss of quality with jpeg, so you should never save intermediate files as jpeg, but writing a quality-10 duplicate jpg at the end will cause little degradation.
• The dimensions of the image should match the print size you ordered exactly (don't order a 16x20 print and submit a 16x20.5 image. You can order a 16x20.5 print). Leave the image resolution at whatever it comes out to be (in the Photoshop "Image Resize" dialog, do not check the "Resample Image" box and in the crop dialog leave blank the resolution box.)
• Color space must be sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998), or ProPhoto. Note that if you use ProPhoto color space then you must work in 16 bits/channel to avoid posterization. If a 16-bit file is larger than you want to upload, then convert to Adobe RGB (1998) and 8 bits/channel as a last step. Our printer color capability is only slightly better than Adobe RGB (1998) and so there is little advantage in using ProPhoto. However, there is a big advantage in using Adobe RGB (1998) over sRGB.
• We do not require that you prepare your image for the sides of wrapped prints. If you want to do this yourself, you need to add image for the sides and an additional 0.5 inches to the dimensions as you requested with your print options. For example, if you ordered a gallery wrap with a 1.5-inch depth, and you want black sides, the width of the black border you submit should be 2.0 inches all around. When constructing the wrap, we make sure the transition to black will occur a little way around the edge so the black won't be seen from the front. Dimensions of the submitted image minus sides of wrap minus the 0.5 inch must match the ordered print size. Treat flat and floating wraps the same as a 0.25 inch gallery wrap and frame wraps the same as a 0.5 inch gallery wrap. When you provide the sides of a wrap, be sure to indicate Crop: Yes on the order otherwise you will not be able to order the face size you want (don't worry, we will not crop).
• Because of the inconvenience in transmitting large files to us, we prefer that you do not upsize and sharpen. We upsize to 300 ppi using Perfect Resize and sharpen as the last step. If you want to do this yourself, you may need to use an alternate file transfer method such as Dropbox or FTP (contact us for details).

No guarantee on colors and brightness without proofs

We recommend that you request a free printed proof. We guarantee that the final print will have the same colors as the proof. However, if you are not color managed and do not approve proofs, then the print may not look like the image on your monitor, so in this case we cannot reprint for free if the colors are not right for you. If we do the image preparation without a discount, then the burden is on us to make an acceptable print, and then we do guarantee you will like the colors and brightness.

Acceptance of your submitted images

If any of the above requirements are not met, we will ask you to fix them and resubmit or forgo the discount for print-ready images. If we feel that the colors, brightness, or contrast are not right, we will give you recommendations, and you will always have the option to resubmit.

Questions?

Contact us.