Quark or Photoshop for Printing??

[YooDooRight]

Hi,

Newie here. Im just in the middle of designing a friends debut album cover and want to get it right. Is there any difference in the printing quality of fonts between supplying a Phtoshop Tiff file with all the type and images merged together in a flattened file than there is to supplying the same design as a Quark document with Tiff files placed and text written on top in Quark?

In the past i've always had trouble with type in my designs looking a bit cheap and fuzzy and wonder wether it's because i work mainly in Photoshop and supply everything as a Tiff or because of the cheap print houses some record labels use.

Please advise, thanks!

YDR

[Broacher]

When you flatten a PSD file-- you convert the vector edges of all the type layers (and shape layers, if used), permanently. Once your type is in pixels, not curves, then the edges are subject to the screening (halftone) limitations of your output device. Let's say you have some 10 pt type in your piece. When it gets halftoned to the standard press quality of say, 150 halftone lines per inch, that's the effective resolution of the type edges. If you keep it in vector form, the resolution is instead 2400 DOTS per inch, for a standard imagesetter. That's why vector type edges are crisper-- they can actually 'slice' right through a halftone dot, whereas flattened (or rasterized) type cannot. If you change to a Quark produced EPS or PDF, then you should be able to keep the fonts as vectors.

Of course, the other option is to supply a layered, Photoshop PDF (or even PSD) to the printer-- where you have the option of embedding the fonts directly. But your best bet for quality control, no matter how cheap the printer, is to actually manage to talk to the prepress people who are actually going to handle your file, and ask them what they would prefer/recommend for format-- and while you're at it, be sure to discuss colour.

I presume you're talking CD covers, not CD disc printing here? Most of the time, these are two very different print processes, and you need to make compromises on the disc printing side.

[PrintDriver]

A lot of the cheap CD cover printing places just convert whatever you send them into tif output anyway. Talk to the printer to see if there even are vector text options for the price the band is willing to pay.

[rainbow2bryte]

in relation to this question, made me think of another that has bugged me for awhile-
Sooo...if you keep you PS file in layers rather than flattening, does that in fact mean that your text is going to output vector?
does the text ONLY get rasterized after flattening?