What is camera-ready artwork?

Q: What is camera-ready artwork?
A. Camera ready artwork is crisp, clear, color separated art in black and white format to the exact size needed on the media. Huh?

Q: What does crisp mean?
A: For the printing industry, that means the copy you provide should be on clean bright white paper output from a laser printer that prints 600 dots per inch (DPI) or greater. Sending business cards, stationary, napkins, faxes of the artwork would only cost additional expense for you. Do not use ink-jet printers for an original. If you look closely at the an output, you will see that the ink would bleed onto the paper. This will cause the art to look fuzzy.

Q: What does clear mean?
A: Copies of originals do not work. In a perfect world the art you send into a printer should be about twice the size of how it will be used. Sending business cards, stationary, napkins, faxes of the artwork will only cause an additional expense for you. Do not use ink-jet printers for an original. If you look closely at the output you will see that the ink has bled on to the paper. This may cause the art to look fuzzy.

Q: What does color-separated mean?
A: Every color used on you promotional piece must be sent through the printer just for that color. To do this you have to supply art that can be separated into each of its colors. There are two typical ways of doing this, spot color separation, and Process color separation.

Q: What are spot-color separations?
A: In commercial printing, a spot color is uses a solid ink color and prints individually, one plate per spot color. Printing processes that use spot colors include screen printing, and pad printing.

Q: What are process colors separations?
A: Process printing uses percentages of only four colors in different blends to produce the colors of the final print. These four colors are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The letters in the printing industry for each color are C for cyan, M for magenta, Y for yellow and K for black. (CMYK). In commercial printing, the process of splitting colors in a composite image to produce a number of separate grayscale images, on for each primary color in the original image. In the case of a CMYK image, four separations (one for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) must be made.

Since there are many printing methods in the advertising specialty industry, we at AdXPress Imprints can assist you in preparation of your artwork for your particular advertising specialty or promotional product on which you wish to have your logo or message.