discussion point - janice w

What file image format should we use? What image format suits our work most and can present the best of it?

To some point, I can be considered an entirely newbie to the design and publication field, who have no clue about professional and art work used file image formats; GIF and JPG files are the only formats I have been using for storing images before I am introduced to this course. This lecture gives final enhancement and inspirations to the typography project.

In the past, I thought that design and publication are real two separate jobs, where designers will never get involved in printing. However, due to the evolve of digital printing, this job is now shifted to the designers. In designing our magazine pages, there is no guarantee that what we have created will look exactly the same with the printed version; we therefore can’t leave the print job to the “printer”, we have to manage the colour space, image resolution and bleed ourselves. (these elements of the image affect much the actual/physical copy of work) There's nothing worse than designing something amazing not printed out how you planned. 

TIFF is a file format for storing images, is popular among graphic designers, photographers and the publishing industry. TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, publishing and page layout applications, such as scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition. TIFF is a popular format for high color-depth images, along with JPEG and PNG. a TIFF file can be a container holding compressed JPEG images. Unlike standard JPEG files, TIFF is using lossless compression which can be edited and re-saved without losing image quality. However, this is not the case when using the TIFF as a container holding compressed JPEG. Other TIFF options are layers and pages.

Encapsulated PostScript is a standard graphics file format for exchanging images, drawings or even complex images between applications and softwares. EPS-files usually contain a small preview image that is used to visualize the content of the file. However, if EPS files are sent to a printer that does not support Postscript, the quality will not equal that of the read EPS artwork.

However, compressed JPG files are being widely used in the printing industry nowadays due to their speedy delivery which save up production cost and time.

Saving our work in the most appropriate image format is CRUCIAL to the outcome of our original and ideal design. 


Reference:
http://www.prepressure.com/library/file-formats/