Macquarie Editions strives for the highest quality prints from your files. The way you capture images, process/edit them and prepare the files you provide for printing however largely determines the output quality you’ll get. The following are general guidelines for the last step:

• Your monitor is the window on your image. Better and (more importantly) carefully calibrated and profiled monitors will give a closer screen to print match. In general, notebook screens are not satisfactory for this purpose but can be improved with careful calibration/profiling. The ideal is a dedicated external monitor (supported by most notebooks). Things to look for in a monitor are evenness of display (luminance and colour) and a wide viewing angle. The screen should have a non-reflective coating. Luminance levels for screen to print matching for exhibition are typically 80-100 cd/m² (slightly higher at brighter ambient light levels) so ensure that your monitor can perform well at this level otherwise your prints will be correspondingly too dark. Paper can convey only a limited contrast range so having a bright and contrasty display sets unrealistic expectations. If you’re planning to move an LCD monitor away from its typical whitepoint/gamma of 6500ºK/2.2 you’ll require a model with higher bit depth (10-14 bit LUT) and ideally internal (hardware) calibration.
• For optimal results files should be provided at their original resolution. Don’t automatically resample to 300ppi because this isn’t optimal for the printers used by Macquarie Editions which are capable of resolving detail up to 720ppi. Resampling will either throw away information that the printer can use or bloat the file size unnecessarily.
• A rule of thumb to figure out a rough print size for a given file is to divide the pixel dimensions by 240ppi (for digital) or 300ppi (for film) but anything down to about 180ppi can often deliver satisfactory prints. The actual results depend a lot on the quality of the pixels, subject matter (especially if it contains high frequency detail), print viewing distance, paper texture etc. The smaller you print, the higher the quality under close inspection.
• Choose a colour space appropriate to the image colours (a more detailed explanation can be found here) and tag your file with this space when saving it. Files that will be printed as B&W can be converted to a grayscale space to reduce size.
• Avoid clipping shadows and/or highlights in your image as this is detail that cannot be retrieved. The same goes for over-saturating images in smaller spaces which will clip individual channels. Photoshop’s Histogram panel will show you if clipping is present.
• Avoid over-sharpening as the results aren’t repairable. Some sharpening is generally required at capture time for both digital and film originals but this should be modest. Output sharpening, as required, will be applied prior to printing using routines developed in-house for optimal results.
• If using film originals, consider having Macquarie Editions scan the transparency/negative with its professional scanner. Consumer level scanners (Epson, Nikon, Canon, Minolta etc) though convenient can’t deliver the same results. Scanner specifications (resolution, Dmax, bit depth etc) are pretty meaningless … the effective values are generally lower. Absolute film flatness is essential for a good scan. The deficiencies of the scanner will show up in larger prints.
• Files should be provided as RGB (or Grayscale), TIFF, all layers flattened and at working bit depth but in reality any file format that Photoshop will read is OK. Files that contain vector content (text etc) should however be provided un-flattened.

If you have any questions regarding the preparation of your files, please don’t hesitate to ask