I’m the Graphic Designer at the print shop I work at. I had one of the CSR’s ask me if there were any “simple scaling” tools that might be online that they could use for scaling customer art just to check the size and give quotes to our customers.
We wouldn’t be scaling and sending it directly to production, they just want something that can use to get quotes out. I would be the one to do the scaling Ai or Ps and preflight before it goes to production. Any recommendations? They don’t want to have to install Ai or PS on their computers just to do scaling.
I don’t get it. A more specific example might help, but it’s not really clear what is meant by “scaling just to check the size”. If one is to scale something, wouldn’t that entail setting a size? So what’s to check? Resolution? That could be done with (really) simple math; no physical scaling needed. So, can you clarify?
An example would be along the lines of something that happened today. I had a CSR receive art from a customer. They called me into their office to ask me if there was something in Adobe Acrobat Pro (specifically) that they could very simply scale art with. I replied with “No, there is not a tool like that in Acrobat Pro that can do this”. The reason it needed to be scaled is because the art was 5"x3" and the customer wanted it to be larger but to scale.
Typically, our CSR’s would receive art from a customer if they have it and ask me to check scaling but they are wanting to do this more on their end so they 1. Don’t have to bother me as much and 2. So they can get a quicker response on sizes for a price estimate. I’m usually pretty busy throughout the day so they want to skip over asking me altogether. After they have a size, they’ll have me do the actual scaling and preflight of the file before production. Does that make sense? Maybe something like this doesn’t exist and they just need to do the math on it.
Well that, in itself, I understand of course, but I still don’t get how a CSR having the capability of scaling that up, say to 15 x 9 for instance, on his/her screen, gives them any sort of leg up on producing a price quotation.
I’m sort of in the same boat as HotButton, I don’t really get what you’re asking about.
If all you’re trying to do is scale up or down dimensions, like HotButton said, it’s straight-forward math that a calculator can handle. A quick Google search turned up several online tools, like below. Given the ease of doing this kind of thing, though, I’m suspecting that I’m just not understanding your question.
I know exactly what they are talking about.
CSR is a Customer Service Rep.
It’s the ease of the answer that is making us somewhat incredulous that the CSRs can’t do this math. I haven’t met one yet that can’t. It ain’t rocket science. Someone just needs to show them, and maybe write it down.
The job should require knowing the tiny bit of math involved in the scaling of files. You just multiply the two numbers by the same number to keep it in proportion. Or if they need to check if something will scale proportionally, they divide.
As an example your 5" x 3" file going to 60" x 36" is a scaling factor of 12x or 1200%.
It’s particularly loathsome when the client sends a 5" x 3" file and wants a 60"x 48" enlargement while keeping the proportions. You either have to add more image or bounce it back at the client and tell them [nicely] to do it right.
