Color & Print Appearance

Printed color never matches what you see on a screen. Your monitor is backlit and mixes light. A press lays toner on paper.

Export as CMYK

Presses print in CMYK. If you send us an RGB file we'll convert it as accurately as we can, but the conversion is a guess at what you wanted, and the result can shift.

Export your cover as a print quality PDF with a CMYK profile embedded. In Canva, choose PDF Print and tick the CMYK option. In Photoshop or InDesign, convert to CMYK before you export and use soft proofing to preview the conversion.

Our Press Prints Deep

Dark areas can come out darker than you expected, and shadow detail can close up. If you've been preparing files for a printer that runs light, your usual compensation will overshoot with us.

Adjusting Your Files

Make brightness and contrast changes in your file. A press adjustment applies to every page of every book in the run, so it can't brighten one illustration without affecting all of them.

If your proof came back darker than you wanted, try:

• Lifting the shadows and raising the black point
• Reducing overall contrast slightly
• Brightening midtones, or adding roughly 0.2 to 0.4 stops of exposure

Make one round of changes, then order a new proof.

Resolution

600 dpi is the minimum. Our press can use 1200, and that is what we would rather have, so send the highest resolution you have.

Most blurry covers we see were exported flat and then stretched to fit the template. Place your original design on the template at its native size instead of scaling a flattened export up.

Variation Between Print Runs

Color shifts slightly between runs. Toner age, paper lots, press calibration, and humidity all move it a little through the year. Two orders of the same book months apart may not be identical.

If the difference is large enough that copies don't look like the same book, that isn't normal. Report it and we'll look at it.

We Don't Edit Your Files

We print exactly what you upload. We won't color correct or resize anything, and we can't change fonts at all, because they're embedded in the PDF. If something needs to change, change it in your file and upload it again.