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Archive for June, 2010
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
How to Set up Spot Varnish for Offset Printing
There are a variety of ways to set up spot varnish plates for printing, the easiest way to to have your printer do it for you! If you do want to do it yourself here are two easy ways.
First, you can create a spot color layer in your photoshop images. This method has its pros and cons, on the pro side you can see the varnish on top of the image and make sure it lines up exactly how you want it. On the con side, the varnish layer will print with your photo when you try and do a proof. I use magenta as my spot color (but “name” it Varnish). In the final proofing stage through our prepress software we can print out a proof with varnish included or a proof with no varnish included, we usually do both, it cost a bit more but a LOT less than a re-run if your spot varnish is not set up correclty.
You can also set up a different file for the spot varnish. Once you have finished creating your design and it is approved do a “save as” and add varnish into the name at this point you can just fill the areas where you want the spot varnish with the spot color “varnish” (that you must create in the swatches palette). If your images are square just delete the content of the image box and fill the box with “varnish” if you have images silhouetted you will have to make a selection of the area in your image file and fill it with the spot color “varnish”. There are a variety of other ways to pull off a spot varnish color, the main thing to do is to have someone look at your file and make sure you have set it up correctly. This will require spending a few minutes with them and explaining your goals and concept.
Have fun with your set up… and when ready to print, call us for a custom quote!
Christopher Robinson
Tags: diy, printing, spot varnish
Posted in Design, Resources, Training/Tutorials | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Apple’s new iOS is now ready for download and update.
I downloaded and installed the new OS update for the iPhone, Currently I am using a 3GS. The new software is running well and the graphic enhancements are very pleasing to the eye. The function of the new features is as expected. The unified inbox… Jury is still out, I will have to use it for a while to see if I like this feature (when checking 6 email accounts!) One thing to mention is that you must download the iBook app from the app store, it is free. I absolutely LOVE the folders. I am sure I will have to change the groupings and I was a little disappointed that you could only put 12 apps in each folder, more with a scroll function would have been nice. I also like the digital zoom and it preforms much better than most I have used on cameras in the past. I rate the update as a whole 5 out of 5 stars, Download it and enjoy! for more info go to Apple’s site HERE.
Don’t forget to pop by our site and order some printing today!
Christopher Robinson
Tags: iphone, OS
Posted in News | No Comments »
Friday, June 18th, 2010
Apple’s Mac mini Receives the Editors Choice Award
PC Magazine’s Joel Santo Domingo says “With a new aluminum unibody chassis and a host of new components, the Apple Mac mini ($699 list) is the best little Mac on the market—maybe even the best mini PC… if you want a compact, quiet, powerful desktop for your den, bedroom, or living room: Get an Apple Mac mini with HDMI. It’s the  compact nettop killer, and is finally the perfect PC for enjoying Internet programming and downloads.” The small form factor Mac received a rating of 4.5 out of 5 and the Editors Choice Award. (full review here)
My personal opinion of the old Mac mini was that it was an underpowered entry level mac that you couldn’t do much in the way of graphics on. That is not the case with this new model. The new mini measures in at 1.4 height, 7.7 width, and 7.7 in depth (inches). The new unibody enclosure is produced out of a single block of aluminum with CNC machines. Apple got rid of the “brick” power supply (thank you Apple!) and squeezed in a few more ports on the back including a HDMI port! They also added an SD card slot and it contains 4 USB 2.0, firewire 800, gigabit ethernet, 802.11n wireless technology, bluetooth… the list goes on.
Storage and ram have been upgraded as well, the new mini can take up to a 500 Gig hard drive and also accepts up to 8 gigs of memory. The new NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics chip is twice as fast as previous model minis. To say the least, I was impressed. Pair it up with the new wireless keyboard and a wireless magic mouse and you have a wonderful little setup. Check out the full specs and see lots of pictures at the Apple Store site.
If you are on a hardware budget, and the iMac is still too pricey, consider one of these new mini machines. If your on a budget printing collateral material, come see our selection of products at extremely reasonable prices!
Christopher Robinson
Tags: hardware, mac mini, Macintosh
Posted in News | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
The Confusion with Black Ink and Offset Printing.
 simulation of color inks Many designers are unclear exactly how inks react to other inks and paper itself. To start with the basics almost all inks are transparent. This allows for the advent of “process” or full color printing. The actual dot patterns produced by each color are set up in a rosette pattern and the colors overlap. The additive combination of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black Inks produce the spectrum of colors available in process Printing. When using black in a process Job your type (unless it is rather large block type) should be composed of only Black ink. Otherwise any mis-registration on press will give a fuzzy look. Shapes and objects on the other hand should be composed of a rich black, black ink and a combination of the other inks at different percentages (example: 70C, 50M, 30Y, 100K). This combination delivers a black that is “blacker” and a bit cool. There are a many variations of rich black used in the printing business. One thing to note is that with laser printers black will seem darker than on press. Also most professional design programs show a representation of “rich black” on screen. As a rule typically trapping software will overprint black ink, so if your black graphic overlaps another color graphic it will seem darker where the overlap occurs if you don’t use a rich black.
Christopher Robinson
If you need more help try our online common mistakes section
Tags: black, black ink, process printing
Posted in Resources, Training/Tutorials | No Comments »
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Crazy Dual Screen Tablet PC Prototype
A little known company named Kno Inc. has produced an interesting device to compete in the school/education market segment. This beast is a dual screen tablet PC. Each screen is 14″ and it weighs in at 5.5 pounds. It is about an inch thick so it is comparable to a laptop but slap another monitor in where the keyboard would normally go. This little minx runs in Linux and the company calls it a “digital textbook platform” Pricing is set to be “under $1000″ which compared to the iPad seems a bit pricey, then again it does have two monitors. Check out the video below for more info, it is a prototype, so I am guessing the on screen demos may be simulated.
Problem retrieving videos from provider: Forbidden
Christopher Robinson
Tags: tablet pc
Posted in News | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
The iPhone 4, and a preview of the new iOS 4
The new iPhone officially announced yesterday at the Apple WWDC is an amazing piece of electronics. The people I have spoken with so far are all amazed, as am I, that Apple could pull off something as advanced as much as this phone is. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next! here is the video on the new phone from Apple’s YouTube site.
Problem retrieving videos from provider: Forbidden
We don’t sell iPhones but if you need brochures printed we can help you with that!
Christopher Robinson
Tags: Apple iphone, iphone, wwdc
Posted in News | No Comments »
Monday, June 7th, 2010
Fresh News from the Apple World Wide Developers Conference
Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder) was out on stage as a wave of huge applause washed through the room. He started with an update on the WWDC where there are 5200attendees from 57 countries. The conference sold out in eight days. He then stated “We apologize to folks who couldn’t be here… this is the biggest place we can get, so… anyway”. On to the nuts and bolts of the announcements. The iPad will now support PDF books as well, and he stated they are selling one every three seconds, over 2 million so far. Some nice changes to iBooks such as adding notes and bookmarks and the aforementioned PDF “bookcase”.
 image courtesy Apple©2010 Now to the iPhone and big news, Netflix is adopting its iPad app over to the iPhone! No more waiting for chinese food surfing the web, and it will be free. They also have Mark Pincus from Zynga, they have ported over the bane of Facebook (Farmville) and its available now (golf clap).
They also previewed the new iPhone, pretty amazing stuff, ”FaceTalk” Apple’s video call technology will only work on WiFi to start with. The new phone itself is an amazing piece of technology. Front and rear cameras (5M with led flash on the back side). Dual sound canceling microphones, The metal frame of the thing is actually the antenna. All stainless steel and glass surfaces and very sexy See Apple’s site here for a video preview. The screen has 2x the resolution of previous iPhones. 326 pixels per inch, wholesome goodness. Steve goes into a lot more on the technical side, which I won’t bore you with, but do have a look for yourself.
If you need some Printing done have a look at our main page! Looking for an iPad or iPhone? look at the Apple online store (link above!) or an Apple store location in you city if there os one!
Christopher Robinson
Tags: apple, iOS4, iPad, iphone, News, wwdc
Posted in News | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
Windows nevermore at Google Corporate.
Financial Times reports that Google’s use of the Windows OS is being phased out internally. The word on the street … since January (after the “China Pullout Hacks“) security issues have been looked at and the decision to move towards the Mac OS on all desktop machines. Some are being allowed to keep windows on laptops but allowing employees to remain on a Windows desktop now requires upper level approval (CIO as an example). They are still allowed to Run Unix as well and the Mac OS, and Google’s Chrome OS will be pushed eventually I am sure! Check out the Financial Times article linked above for more information.
Here at PGprint.com we are cross platform, you can upload files from any OS you use! Working in a PDF format allows us to accept more file types than many commercial printers. Need Help? Look at our Help Section.
Christopher Robinson
Tags: google, mac OS, windows
Posted in News | No Comments »
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