Graphic design help?

[liv]

OK, so this is in fact wedding-related, but I need the benefit of your wisdom in an area that isn't really specific to weddings. Namely, we're trying to get invitations custom-printed. We have a scan of a beautiful line drawing by hatam_soferet, and we're trying to combine it with text saying "Jack and Liv request the pleasure of your company etc". The printing-company have asked for a 1:1 scale PDF; however, I'm completely unable to create such a file without everything ending up horribly pixellated. Do you have any good suggestions for how to do this?

Things I have tried:

• Combining text and image in Open Office's equivalent of Powerpoint, Impress, then export to PDF. This leads to really awful resolution.
• Combining text and image in Photoshop (albeit and old version, I'm only up to PS5), then saving as PDF. This leads to a PDF with pretty bad resolution, which is also much bigger, in physical dimensions, than the original 1:1 scale image I saved.
• Saving the Photoshop file as .png (with the intention to ask the printers if they can cope with other graphic formats). At low res this gives a poor quality image, at high res this gives a (physically, I don't care about file-size) huge image.

Things I could try - which do you think would be most likely to work?:

• Fiddle with the image dimensions and resolution until I get something that magically comes out 1:1 when I change the file format.
• Ask the artist to rescan the line drawing into a format more suited to line drawings than jpg.
• Send the text and image to a friend who has more suitable software for this task. Any volunteers?
• Download some software that's better at making PDFs out of line-art than what I have. I'm willing to pay a few tens of pounds for this because it could be useful for work as well as personal stuff; I'm not willing to buy anything on the scale of Adobe Illustrator!

Umm, anything I haven't thought of? I have some experience of messing around with graphics because there are similar issues when you're trying to prepare figures for publication in journals, but I'm stumped by this one.

Also, does anyone know a better font than Italianno? I'm looking for something calligraphy-ish, but a reasonably legible Italic style rather than a very swirly copperplate or anything very loopy or elaborate. Italianno is about right aesthetically but I don't really like its numbers, and there are a few minor infelicities in the way the letters combine.

Comments

[mathcathy]

Use LaTeX. Create a file which only includes that image then compile with the command pdflatex filename.tex

[blue_mai]

I don't really follow everything you said there, but I think I can do what you want in InDesign. The quality of the print will depend on the resolution of the scanned image - 300dpi is good, but anything over 200dpi should be fine. Email me the bits. I have never tried using fonts of the web in print stuff, but can give it a go, or find the nearest ones I have on my computer and show you various versions.

[ursamajor]

It sounds like blue_mai has you covered, and they recommend doing pretty much exactly what I would've recommended doing, either in InDesign if you have access, or Photoshop would also be okay. \o/

Just because the image is visually huge on the screen does *not* mean it will print out that way; that can, to a certain extent, be "fixed" in Photoshop by keeping the pixel dimensions the same and switching the DPI. But the most important part is truly the bit where "the quality of the print will depend on the resolution of the scanned image". It can't be emphasized enough.

When you open up the pic in Photoshop, what's the width and height in pixels? Let's say for example, you want the printed card to be 5" x 8"; if the image isn't at least 1500 pixels x 1800 pixels, you may need to get the original physical image rescanned. For printing purposes, my file-type knowledge is probably slightly outdated, but you probably want the image file to be a .tiff or an .eps (lossless) rather than a jpg (lossy) if you can at all help it. Particularly as you make modifications to a jpg, the quality can go down pretty badly with every new save-and-recalculate-compression. .png is not really meant for print products; avoid it in this scenario.

[liv]

That's such a mathmo's answer! I'm almost surprised jack didn't already suggest that. But yes, I can see that might well be better than all the messing around I've been trying to do. Thanks.

[liv]

Thank you sooooo much! I have sent you an email with all the relevant stuff.

[liv]

Thanks for all this technical advice; you've filled in several of the bits I was missing. I was pretty sure that everything would depend on the resolution of the original scan, which is currently at only 72 dpi. I may need to ask the artist to rescan it after all, but right now it's 12'' x 9'', and it needs to be about an inch high in the final version, so I am hoping that the resolution will be adequate.

I think part of my problem with the image apparently "changing size" is something to do with my printer settings. It may not actually be huge, it maybe that the printer software is somehow automatically expanding the image to fill the whole of an A4 page and that could be part of why the quality is poor. But I am a bit nervous of sending a file to the printers when they specifically asked for 1:1 and I only think it's the right size.

The file-type advice is also very useful. I would use lossless .tif for line art for work purposes, but I got a bit distracted by the fact that the printers asked for .pdf and when that wasn't working, I was trying to fall back on something more "standard". But they're printers, I assume they know what a .tif is! I've suspected from the beginning that .jpg is the wrong file format for a scan of a line-drawing, but I've been trying to fix things without asking the artist to rescan as I don't want to hassle her. But that may not be the best way of cutting corners.

[ursamajor]

*nodnod* Your file sounds like it's 864px by 648px; largest "safe" print size based on those pixels and printing at 300dpi is ~2.88"x 2.16" , so you should be okay. You can "convert" the dpi in Photoshop - I think the order of operations is to open "image [re?]size," make sure the measurements are in pixels and note the pixels numbers for width and height, change the dpi from 72 to 300, then fill back in the original pixel numbers you noted previously and confirm the change. :)

Also with Photoshop, you should be able to convert it from a .jpg to a .tiff; especially if you go with the "work only in Photoshop" option, I'd work from the .tiff rather than the .jpg because of the "lossiness" issues.

[rochvelleth]

I have been working on digital images for a publication project recently, so I can very much sympathise with image-related ARGH!

If it helps, CUP insist on 1200 dpi for a line drawing, because apparently a line drawing needs to be at much higher resolution than a photograph to come out right at their 'printable size'. You could re-scan the image at 1200 dpi, and then in your image-manipulator of choice make sure its dimensions are the original ones, and that might work.

I have been trying to find ways round re-scanning because I don't have the originals, and actually in the book the images will be considerably smaller than original size - so I don't mind a bit of loss of quality when digitally manipulating for that. I'm not sure from the full-size point of view whether there is an alternative to rescanning, but from your comment below I think you don't want it to be original size?

It looks as though you have the offers of help you need, but if I can help let me know!

[liv]

Thank you, that's more or less what I was trying to do (based on my experience using Photoshop for work stuff), but this is more systematic than what I had. Much appreciated!

[liv]

OK, that's a very useful tip that you need much higher resolution for a line drawing than other images. I may need to ask very politely and apologetically for the image to be rescanned at high res. And yeah, I am shrinking it a lot, we want to send out little cute postcards for the invitations and the original is almost a whole page. But it's looking like the shrinking isn't enough to keep the quality decent, sadly.

This digital image fiddling really is one of the most annoying things about being an academic, isn't it? I sort of hoped that my experience from the work context would carry over, but I'm still really floundering!

[lovingboth]

If the scan isn't much higher resolution, you get the dreaded jaggy lines, especially if it's a limited number of colours (i.e. B/W is the worst).

What resolution does the printer want?

[forthwritten]

You've probably already tried this, but have you tried looking on dafont.com? Here are a couple of the fonts I found:

http://www.dafont.com/adine-kirnberg.font
http://www.dafont.com/chancery-cursive.font - the kerning is a bit odd, I thought
http://www.dafont.com/aquiline-two.font

[owlfish]

I like playing with http://www.myfonts.com/ when looking for the right font for a project. Lots of free ones, lots of commercial ones.

[emperor]

This was going to be my suggestion you. Can can probably make LaTeX position text at exact locations in the page, too, if were feeling brave.

[mathcathy]

You could do.

[rochvelleth]

Oh, it is annoying, isn't it? All my contributors for my conference volume sent their images in the wrong resolution, and I have been panicking trying to work out whether digitally fiddling with them would be sufficient for the publication. The jury's still out on that one.

[purplecthulhu]

This is not a useful comment - but Qntal! I thought I was the only person who listened to weird medieval electronica!

[verazea]

I've been doing lots of scanned line drawing fiddling and yes, I too have found unless black and white drawings stuff are scanned at a much higher res they usually come out jagged and scanning at a high res to start with is by far the easiest solution I've been able to come up with. They can then be reduced to a more sane size - but not too much smaller than the original. The trouble is that thin lines start to fade into the background and the image looks very wrong or bits disappear completely. You can try to make the lines be thicker but obviously this only works so far.

[liv]

You've convinced me; I went ahead and asked the artist to rescan her work. Turns out she hadn't intended to send me the file at 72 dpi in the first place, so it's probably a good thing I asked! The printer didn't specify a resolution, but I'm kind of assuming more is better in this case.

[liv]

Yeah, it really often happens that you can't improve the resolution of your originals, for all kinds of reasons. And there's a lot you can do with digital enhancement, but it only goes so far.

[liv]

Heh, I'd forgotten you had lots of experience in digitizing line drawings. I think you're right that we may have problems with the lines getting faint when we shrink a large image, but I mind faint lines a lot less than jagged / pixelly lines.

[liv]

Thanks for those! I actually hadn't thought of dafont, it's been such a long time since I was doing anything that needed fonts beyond the standard range that comes with Windows. The sites I bookmarked back in the 90s are a bit obsolete by now!

[liv]

Shiny shiny! Thanks for the tip.

[liv]

Funny, last time I put Qntal in my music field I got a similar comment from iddewes, so there's at least three of us. I was very very obsessed with Dulcis amor for a while a couple of years ago. Good stuff.

[iddewes]

yep, I like Qntal too...are you guys into Ernst Horn's other stuff too, like Deine Lakaien and Helium Vola by the way? :)