Though there might be added costs when you engage in full color printing, the impact that you can have on the consumer of your marketing materials will make up for the cost associated with printing in full color. Color increases information retention and also increases the odds that the viewer will actually look at your message. But if you do not choose the right settings before printing your image, you may then discover errors as soon as you hit print.

Convert To CMYK

Always print with CMYK to print the best-quality images. The easiest approach is to set-up the file for CMYK immediately rather than later converting it. Never print in RGB, which is set of colors only designed for viewing on a screen. Unlike with RGB, in which white is the combination of all the other colors, CMYK has white as the absence of all other colors.

Also, make sure to convert spot colors to CMYK. You may have hidden shadows or glowing portions of the image that appear unexpectedly. The transparent areas of transparent images might not appear, and these areas will instead be represented as white. Also, some of the spot colors will not convert into the proper shade and hue.

Add Enough Cyan And Magenta For Blue

Blues will sometimes print as purple. Look at the Cyan and Magenta values and make sure that you use at least a 30% difference. If you do not have enough Magenta, but include a lot of Cyan, the color will look blue on the screen, but will look purple when printed.

Add Yellow, Magenta And Cyan For Rich Black

You might think that simply black will produce the darkest black. However, the darkest black actually has a mixture of Yellow, Magenta and Cyan. So, if you are not happy with how dark your image is, increase these values.

Adjust The Image Color So That The Font Is Visible

When using text and an image, one of the challenges is that the image behind can make the text difficult to read. One solution is to lighten the image and keep the text dark. Also, if the image is very dark, a light font may be more visible.

Select A High-Enough Resolution

Always make sure the resolution is high enough. A low resolution will look absolutey terrible when printing the same image blown up to a much larger size. It should be at least 300 DPI. With all of the settings properly set, you are ready to press print, and will be more likely to have better results.