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We use high-resolution digital inkjet printing to produce banners, posters, and murals for indoor display. These graphics
are primarily used in the promotional products industry (i.e. trade shows, conventions, conferences, and exhibit displays).
All of the graphics we offer are printed in full-color onto paper or polyester white film using digital inkjet printing which is, unless otherwise noted, protected with a textured laminate (not gloss) that preserves rich color and deep blacks with a minimum of glare.
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While it would be much easier to make prints without testing the colors first, we feel obligated to pay very close attention to how your digital file will print on our printing equipment and on the media we use. Color printing technology has improved in quantum leaps over the past dozen or so years, but despite the best efforts of technological wizards to develop color technology and profiles that make color predictable and reliable, in the real world it comes down to the "eyeball" judgement of the person making the print.
Color is affected not only by various digital formulas, but also by the particular make and even batch of paper. In digital color printing, you would be amazed by how different colors can look when printed on two different papers, even though they appear to have the same white color. Consequently, the colors on your monitor may or may not be close to the colors in the final print.
For the above reason we ask customers to provide us with a guideline or reference when color is critical. This could be a paper print or pms (Pantone Matching System) number. If a designer has shown an 8 x 10 proof to the client, we would like to see this same print so we know what the customer is expecting to see. Pantone Matching System numbers are useful because we know the color swatch book we are looking at is the same as the one you are looking at. While we can’t promise to match formula colors (because the C,M,Y,K,Lc,Lm color spectrum is limited compared to pms formula colors), we do promise to get close enough so that no one would notice without a side-by-side comparison.
Photographic color is different from logo color or specified colors in a graphic design because we may not need a reference to achieve good photographic color. In other words, we can use our own judgment to ensure that the sky looks like sky and the grass is the color of grass. We can see that if the sun is shining bright in the original photo, then the print will make it look like a sunny day. People will be people-colored, not bluish or purplish, etc.
Digital or scanned photos with very bad color may be beyond repair, but we will make an effort to make them look as good as possible. Sometimes, we can understand your intentions with an effective phone conversation. We could tell you, for example, that the blues in your file are looking a little purple in our system or that your beige background color looks pinkish, and you could tell us that you really want a true blue and a beige that isn’t on the pink side. Similarly, if we notice text or a logo that has jaggy edges, we could place a call or send an email to alert the designer. Sometimes, we can make the fix ourselves, and sometimes the customer makes the fix and sends a new file. This extra effort on our part is simply a matter of paying attention. It’s against our nature to do it any other way, because we really don’t want a customer to get a print he is not happy with. It does, however, slow down the process considerably and inevitably affect our pricing. In other words, we simply don’t try to compete on price. Our pricing may not be the highest, but it is certainly not the lowest. It should be somewhere in between, because we want to provide as much value as possible.
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