Margin GuidesĪs with bleed, safety margins have an industry standard. Now do the same using the left ruler to the left and right of the page. When designing, any content that should bleed off the edge should be flush with the edge of the page, overlapping your bleed guides. Now click and drag from the top ruler, and place a Guide 1/8th” above the bottom edge of the page. Click and drag from your top ruler and place a Guide 1/8th” down from the top of the page. So, the trim edge is 1/8th” in from the top, bottom, left, and right.
We’ve already established that standard bleed is 1/8th”, and your document size includes bleed. I know, bummer, and hopefully this post will let you avoid that in the future, but you have to start over. Well first, I should say that if you’ve already created a design at 300ppi or less, using anything other than plain, unadorned, still-editable text, you can’t just scale it up.
If you print a document at what we’ve all been told is high-resolution 300ppi, it’s gonna look pixelated (what we in the biz refer to as “bad”). Plus, it turns out that a lot of what we’ve been taught about how pixels and resolution interact with a printer is just wrong, so that doesn’t help. So Photoshop has to take these clean-edged mathematical curves that make up the simple letters you typed and convert them into jagged, aliased, ugly little pixels. Since text is the thing that makes design design-that is, the practice of doing nice arty things for a real, measurable purpose-that’s kind of important. The reason Photoshop isn’t great for print design is that it’s a raster-based program, and text is vector-based data.
#Photoshop print to scale how to#
You certainly can create print design in Photoshop, and I’m gonna tell you how, but just expect a frustrating process.īut I’m not here to tell you not to do something. I’m here to tell you how to use a complex tool as best you can, even if it might not be the best one for the job. With that preamble aside, onward to victory. You lovely people are here because you want me to tell you that designing for print in Adobe Photoshop is a cinch that it might be a little tough but you'll be happy relying on this program for all your print design needs. Well, dear friend, I’m going to come right out and drop my first piece of Photoshop advice on you: maybe just don’t.