Using Photoshop to Create High-Resolution Print-Ready Images. : VIDA Support

Using a Photo Editor to Create High-Resolution Print-Ready Images

The screenshots below are taken of Photoshop but any professional photo editing software can work. GIMP is an open-source photo editing software that is also highly capable.

Step 1:

First off, you're best off to take a photo of your artwork with a DSLR camera, this will give you the best quality and size for your artwork print. The file format given here will then be recognized as a raw file. If you’re starting with a JPEG skip to Step 2.

Open up your raw image in your photo editor, we've taken screenshots from the views of Photoshop, in this example it’s a .nef file. Photoshop will initially give you a Raw editor in which you can tweak some of the images details, like Temperature, Shadows, Saturation etc… After changing or not changing the settings, click Open Image. Photoshop will save any changes to your raw file for later.

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Figure A

Step 2:

Let’s make sure we’re working on the part of the photo that’s actually being used in production.

You’ll be making a high resolution image for the design provided on the Product Preview that you’ve created. (See Figure B)

One easy way to crop is to use the Marquee tool to select the area you’d like to crop. To crop in Photoshop choose Image -> Crop from the taskbar dropdowns: (see Figure C)

Figure C

Figure B

"Product Preview"

Step 3:

Now we will be changing our Image Size to match the print needs. In Photoshop: Press "Shift+Ctrl+I" or “Cmd+Option+I” in Mac to open the Image Size dialog box. Switch the “Inches” to “Pixels” so you can compare better with the guidelines we’ve given on the High-Res Uploader page:

Figure D

Note: Sizes are ‘width x height px’ in the Dimensions column

It’s a good idea to keep the dimensions easily accessible to you. In Figure D you can see how I aligned the dimensions from the 'High-Res Uploader' page to the left of my Photo Editor window.

Modal Scarves and Cashmere Scarves

Due to the elongated size of these scarves, stretching your image out to the given dimensions will most likely make your image lose a lot of it's quality. We instead carefully arrange your design in a pattern that is dependent on your design's size and look, as well as the Product Preview you originally created. This is why we suggest, unless you have a very long design, that you do not resize your design to fit the scarf size. We will handle that for you to make sure your images will print well at scale.

To make your design work well at scale, resizing you design up to 9000 pixel width could be a good idea. Again, this is dependent on your design, and whether or not you're repeating the pattern.

Tops and Everything else

Change the pixels for your photo to match the pixel dimensions for your product*. If you’re using pattern repeat, you should be trying to match the size of the repeated pattern. If you’re not certain, the safest bet is to give us the highest resolution photo you have of your artwork without resizing.

Don’t worry to match the dimension ratio perfectly. You can just match the width or height, whichever is lower, to the corresponding pixels.

Here’s a photo example of why having the right size of product is important. Our team will be opening up your high-resolution images in a template file that the printers use. The photo on the left, A, is without resizing, B is after resizing. Rendering that resize from a raw image rather than an already compressed image makes things much sharper!

A) B)

PS- In case you were wondering, the blue lines are template guidelines for the sides and top of the shirt depending on size. Outside the blue lines is not printed.

Step 4:

Now to save your image in the .tif or .tiff format. In Photoshop go to File -> Save As, and from the dropdown of Format file-types choose TIFF (Figure E)

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Figure E

Photoshop will then give an options dialogue box asking about your image compression. Since this image is for printing it’s best to choose ‘None’. If you have layers, please discard them as they’ll be just adding to your file size. (see Figure F)