I'm in the process of creating an advertisment. This ad may be appearing in newspapers and brochures. I am creating it with Corel Draw. It is going to be color. The question I have is what is the process I should follow for creating a professional-quality ad.

It has a photo in it, should the photo be cmyk?
What dpi should I save the image as?
How should I save the actual ad? I created it in Corel Draw, should I use something else?

Leo

Almost everything that you print should be done in CMYK, or with Pantone colors if it is only a 2 or 3 color job. You can do 5 or 6 color printing but it's very expensive and doesn't sound like it would apply here. (That could be something like CMKY + special inks like gold or silver).

Your DPI should be at 300 or 400. Of course 400 is better, unless they are using a 300 DPI printer for some reason. I know that newspapers are sometimes printed in black and white at 1200 dpi. I'm not sure if they still do this, or if they do color at 1200dpi also. Either 300 or 400 dpi should look pretty good because they both divide into 1200 evenly.

As far as using Corel Draw, you will have to talk to your printer or someone at the newspaper to see if that is acceptable to them. Corel should be able to export to a format that they can use.

As far as resolution goes, the goal is to provide as much information to the printer, without overdoing the filesize. Without going into alot of detail, most printers and imagesetters use halftone screens. Find out the lpi (lines per inch) of the printer that will be doing the job. Most newspapers are printed at 85 lpi, while most magazines and books are around 133-150 lpi. Call up your printer to make sure. A good ratio of scan resolution to print resolution is 2:1. So, if your printer prints at 150lpi, scan/save your image at 300dpi. Anything less, and the quality may go down, anything more and the image quality won't significantly increase.

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