: Which file format is best for printing? What would be the best image format for printing images or designs created with Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator or to print images form a digital camera?

@Si6392903

First question. Print where?

1) If you are printing from home use the same aplication you are working in.

2) To print photos. The first option is to print from the original jpg extracted from your camera. If you are shooting in raw, do your processing you need and generate your jpg, the less compression you put, the less the artifacts will show. That also depends on the photo.

In some cases, lets say for a banner made on photoshop you can choose between jpg with almost no compression, TIFF or a flat PSD copy.

3) From there you probably want to stick with pdf. Embed your color profile and use a PDF X family format (PDF-X1a, PDF-X3) This include lasser prints for a print shop, plotter for a banner or a comercial print house for a magazine.

Image format is not the same as file format.

An image format is commonly a bitmap or raster based image, and a file format is one that can contain other information, like text or vectors.

Your working files (Indd, PSD, CDR, AI) are file formats.

Also there are some generic file formats that can include this diferent type of objects inside. The main one is PDF. Pdf is a newer version of the old eps.

Some notes on your list of image formats

BMP. Just a fat image format. Its only used in some aplications prior for an internal compilation. Do not use for print.

JPG2000. Not much support in web aplications. The truth is I have NEVER ever used it for printing.

PNG. the best raster image format for web graphs, logos, plain images. Not suitable for printing becouse it discards ppi information.

PSD. Do not send a working file. No layers transparencies smart anything. Send just a flattened image. Use It.

JPG. Some people do not use this format for printing. If you really know what are you doing you can safely use it for digital prints. I use it very offen... Becouse I really know what I am doing Xo)

TIFF. A safe bet. Robust and can have a decent compression. Use it but not with jpg compression inside.

Second question. Do you know how to send a file for prtint?

I will not add much here... becouse there are a lot of topics out of the scope of the question.

A good quality print is FAR from the output file format. You can use ANY suitable file format. If you are doing things right you will have a good print. If not, no file format will save you.

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@Phylliss782

It depends a lot on where you print, what printer will be used for the
task and what you need to do with the files.




You might want to stay away from anything JPG because of the compression, that's a start. It can work for huge formats but they are used more as a last option; for example, if you cannot upload a banner of 300mb for printing, you might be "forced" to use a JPG at 15mb!

PNG can be good but they are in RGB color mode; this is not desirable if you print on offset or anything that requires CMYK color mode. You could use it but either the printer will refuse your files and ask you to convert them yourself to CMYK color mode OR the printer will convert it for you and you'll have no control on the final result. Sometimes it gives OK results, sometimes it horrible; you might want to have 100% control on your colors. They can work fine on some digital printing machines that handle RGB well though.

TIFF are a good safe choice for pretty much any kind of printing and color mode but these files are very heavy. That's still the one I find the best in your list and highly compatible with almost any software that can open pictures. Your question is about pictures but TIFF allows transparency and can be useful for this.

There's EPS that is also a safe option for printing but not the best to use on your own personal printer. They can be very convenient in publishing used with some software that can manage huge files and you can increase the performance of your software because of the encapsulated preview that comes with EPS and its small file size. But for everyday image printing or if you need to share the files, I still think TIFF are the safest choice. Personally I still use EPS because it's quick to save these files and they're reliable. You will hear a lot of designers say it's a "legacy" format but you should use what works best for your needs; if you go on the Adobe forum, you will also see tons of designers saying it's "legacy" to use CMYK mode... so...!

You could use PSD but then you might have issues with compatibility if you need to share your files.

Finally, there's PDF that can be used; they're long to save in Photoshop though but they are highly compatible and offer some freedom for compression.



Here's a screenshot to show you the difference in size between all formats, all uncompressed at 300ppi and 15"x 9" size:

You can easily see what could be the right choice for a catalog that contains a lot of high resolution images or if you need to backup a thousand images at top quality or share a few images online, for example.

If you import your images in another software such as Illustrator, InDesign or QuarkXpress than you can work with any file format you want; but you should prioritize PDF as your print-ready file for the whole layout.

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@Gretchen549

Totally depends on print house.

Usually they take raw/psd/ai/eps files, pdf is also an option to convert all of those. Each print bureau have their own standards e.g. transparency flattened, pdf below 1.4 version etc.

Among tiff, jpeg, jpeg2000, bmp, png - those are rarely used in real print houses. However tiff and bmp have no loss and therefore preferable, jpeg2000 is better than plane jpg as it has less size while keep the same quality.

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@Nimeshi706

PDF, EPS, TIFF or native application files (.ai, .psd, .indd).

If they are strictly photos... .tiff or .psd

For Indesign files, .pdf

For Illustrator .ai or .eps or .pdf, but in some cases .tiff works better.

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