I’ve just joined and this is my first post, so hope I’m in the right place to pick someone’s brains, as I’ve been learning Graphic Design on the job for a couple of years, but have no formal training.
I’ve requested a document from a client as a PDF with 10mm bleed and 5mm margin settings. They’ve supplied a TIFF and told me ‘the original design was done so you could adjust bleed margins/resize if necessary without it affecting the design’.
I’ve set up an Indesign doc with the required margin and bleed settings, created a frame the size of the doc including bleeds, and placed the TIFF into a frame and fitted it proportionally. Most oif the content is within the margins, but a small amount of text and the company logo is sitting on the outer edge of the bleed.
Am I missing something? I’m questioning my own judgement here, but this can’t be fixed from the Tiff file right? It needs to be done in the original design file? The person supplying the image advertises as a Graphic Designer, so I don’t want to send it back a 3rd time, without being sure.
Anyone who’d deliver a finished layout as TIFF either doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they’re so worried you’ll alter their work that they’d rather just trash it by rasterizing everything (assuming they even grasp that concept).
If the logo and some text are in your bleed, the original layout did not include bleed, and given the whole thing is now a raster image, there won’t be much you can do about it. Frankly it sounds like you’re the more knowledgeable operator here, so write a polite but direct email stating the file is “unacceptable because the text and logo are rasterized and in the bleed; please correct and resend in an appropriate format.”
TIFF is a fine format for a photograph, but inappropriate for an entire layout for numerous reasons. For that matter, any kind of raster format is — except in certain circumstances — the wrong way to go about building a finished layout.
Whomever gave this to you obviously does not understand the issues involved. Depending on the TIFF file, you might be able to cut things, move things, fill in the holes, etc., but that doesn’t solve the other dozen problems associated with it. Layout should almost always be built in a layout program, like InDesign, that will enable the designer to build as much as possible as vector art while bringing only photos in as raster objects.
Thanks DocPixel, like you say, it wouldn’t help in this instance because of the objects sitting on the outside edge, but it’s interesting to know about the InDesign script. Thanks for that
It’s a native script, and it adds bleed marks to the file. You select the whole thing, then Window/utilities/scripts etc. But no, it won’t fix elements on the edge.
You’re showing the crop marks script. That just adds printers’ marks. It doesn’t do anything to “add bleed” where none exists. This Crop Mark script is one of my favorites because it’ll do large format offsets, not the silly 3mm ones that Adobe thinks you need.
If you want to see a bleed border in order to work to a bleed, you can set that up in your File > Document Setup under Options but this all still requires the bleed actually be there to begin with.
Something like this is what I thought you meant. https://indesignsecrets.com/topic/script-for-adding-bleed-by-duplicating-pixels
A lot of rips will do that for you. It does have its drawbacks though, especially at sizes where your trim might be inches rather than pixels. The image flipper script in the link at the bottom of that thread is a slightly better technique but you will get a hard line at the flip and that can be just as ugly if too much of it shows.
