You may have noticed we talk about Print Ready PDFs quite a bit. Saving your document for print is one of the most crucial steps of the design process. The following are steps to manually saving a perfect Print Ready PDF.
Skip this guide and save time by downloading our SG High Res PDF Preset. This will quickly and automatically save your file with the right settings every time.
To Start in InDesign
- Go to File > Export
- Type in your desired File Name
- Select Adobe PDF (print) from the Format dropdown menu
- Press Save and wait for the Export Adobe PDF dialog box to appear
To Start in Illustrator
- Go to File > Save As
- Type in your desired File Name
- Select Adobe PDF (pdf) from the Format dropdown menu
- Press Save and wait for the Export Adobe PDF dialog box to appear
General
- Pages: All, Pages
- Viewing: Default, Default
- Options: Optimize for Fast Web View
- Create Tagged PDF
- Export Layers “Visible & Printable Layers”
- Interactive Elements: “Do Not Include”
Compression
Compressing and downsampling the Images and Art in your file can significantly reduce the size of a PDF file with little or no loss of detail and precision. If no compression is used the PDF file can be exceedingly large. This will cause longer downloading times and could make sending the file to us difficult.
Color Images:
- Bicubic Downsampling to 300ppi
- for images above 300ppi
- Compression: JPEG
- Image Quality: Maximum
Grayscale Images:
- Bicubic Downsampling to 300ppi
- for images above: 300ppi
- Compression: JPEG
- Image Quality: Maximum
Monochrome Images
- Bicubic Downsamplic to 1200ppi
- for images above 1800ppi
- Compression: Zip
Other Settings
- Compress Text and Line Art
- Crip Image Data to Frames
Marks and Bleeds
We prefer an 1/8″ Bleed Area added to all documents and crop marks beginning at the end of the bleed margin to prevent under trimming.
- Only Select: Crop Marks
- Choose “Default” from the Type dropdown menu
- Select 0.125pt from the Weight dropdown menu
- Enter 0p9 beside Offset
*Be sure to uncheck all unneeded marks/information. (color bars, registration marks, and page information included). These are not needed. If the project is small enough all of this extra page information can push the document up and cause it to print off center.
Bleed and Slug
Bleed: Top: 0p9, Bottom: 0p9, Left: 0p9, Right: 0p9
*Don’t Use Adobe Creative Suite PDF Print Presets
None of the Presets that come with Adobe Creative Suite have bleed settings established. Even if you select the “Use Document Bleed Settings” but have a document without a bleed setting built in then you will still have no bleed on your PDF. Adobe CS also has Crop Marks offset at .0833″ this interferes with our preferred Bleed Area.
Output Settings
- Color Conversion: No Color Conversion
- Profile Inclusion Policy: Don’t Include Profiles
*Output settings from the Adobe PDF “Press Quality Preset” uses “Convert to Destination (Preserve Numbers)” for the Color Conversion – although good for keeping the CMYK values the same, the color destination is set to SWOP V2. This means anything that is RGB/LAB will get converted to this colorspace up front. Even though it sounds good for everything getting converted to CMYK the conversions are not that good. We believe color management is key and prefer to stay away from this setting.
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