If you are going to create artwork on your computer for printing, the following guidelines should be followed to achieve superior results when submitting your job electronically.  The best advice we can give you is to submit your job on-line, on CD or diskette.  Of course, we will accept it printed.  When using electronic media as your submission tool, every print is an original.

Graphic files:  Different formats can produce a wide variety of results. The following is in order of best to worst to use for reproducing a quality printed image.

Tiff or Tif:  Tag Information file format.  This is the best way to save a file for printing. The tiff format does not compress the image so it doesn't have any losses when we go to print the file.  This provides the best quality output.

Eps:  Encapsulated Post Script.  Most raster based (Photoshop) or vector based (Illustrator) programs allow for saving as an eps file.  EPS files work very well for printing as long as you do not place an eps image in a file and then save that file as an eps. (Embedded eps files do not print).

Pict:  The PICT format is widely used between Macintosh page layout and graphics applications as an intermediary file format used for transferring documents between applications.  The PICT format is especially effective at compressing images that contain large, flat areas of color.

Jpg:  Joint Photographics Experts Group (JPEG) compression economizes on the way data is stored and also identifies and discards "extra" data, that is, information beyond what the human eye can see.  Because it discards data, the JPEG algorithm is referred to as "lossy." This means that once an image has been compressed and then decompressed, it will not be identical to the original image. Because of this problem we do not prefer using this format.

Gif:  Graphics Interchange Format file.  The GIF format is commonly used to pass documents between computers. This is a highly compressed format (using LZW compression) that is designed to minimize file transfer time over phone lines. GIF format only supports 8 bit color (256 different colors).