Photoshop File to Press Ready PDF - Why do fonts get all weird?!?!
I’ve been messing around on Photoshop for about 18 years. I’m familiar with it and have my own way of doing most anything I need - from pointless meme type “internet only” stuff to posters and cd/album designs to animation frames and whatnot.
I launched an old-fashioned, bi-monthly, 8-page printed newspaper last year in my hometown of Charlotte, NC.
I jumped in headfirst laying out the pages and actually typing the articles right in Photoshop. I know, I know - every single “Starting Your Own Newspaper” internet article says “DON’T USE Photoshop to design your paper!”, but I didn’t want my newspaper to look like your typical, boring newspaper. I wanted to have the look of an old 60s/70s underground/college paper. Plus - time was ticking and the first issue needed to be created and printed pronto. I didn’t have time to learn a whole new graphics software operating system! So I proceeded making my pages just sorta hoping everything would work out fine.
All the content was created and I was ready to send it to a local printshop. Very naively, I reviewed their prepress guidelines, and just hit the “Export as a PDF” button. Nope. Not even close! All wrong.
Long story short - I panicked and freaked out and had no idea what to do. Then, I remembered good ol’ fiverr. I searched “Photoshop to PDF InDesign” and found a guy in India that knew what I wanted. I sent him the prepress guidelines of the printshop and he said “No problem”. For his convenience, I reduced my 30+ layers of images and text into 2 simple layers - TEXT and IMAGES. He sent me back an absolutely perfect 8-page press ready PDF document that was printed without ANY problem at all! He didn’t recreate my texts in any manner - it was precisely what I designed in Photoshop.
That was in September ‘16. I just printed Issue #7 and I’ve used him every time for the crucial final step. I’m glad I’m giving him some work, but I want to cut out that 5-12 hour waiting period before I’m able to get the paper printed. And if I catch a typo - that could mean an additional 4-10 hours waiting on his revision! When he’s been busy with other projects and unable to complete my order fast - I’d try someone else. Only happened two or three times, but they used completely different fonts and screwed up my sentences/paragraphs. Totally unacceptable.
I took the plunge this summer and got InDesign. Figured that it would be worth the investment. I tried my darndest to follow all of the print shop’s guidelines and create the perfect press ready PDF file for issue #7. Sent them a test and got a reply that the images were fine - but the fonts were bad. Low resolution, pixelated, blurry. Not acceptable. Sure enough, zooming into my PDF - the images looked great but the fonts were bad. For reference, I zoomed into an old issue’s PDF provided by my trusted fiverr associate and the fonts were nice and crisp.
Why? It’s just black marks on a white background. If I’d simply written all the text in pen, scanned it, and placed it in on the page in my Photoshop file - it would most likely look fine and be able to be printed without a problem.
What is it about fonts that get all out of whack in the move from Photoshop to InDesign? I tried flattening everything. Rasterizing everything. The fonts continued to look bad in all of my attempts. I had to crawl back to fiverr and hope he was available to do my typical job in a super rushed manner - and he did.
Really want to solve this riddle. Will be creating the next paper at the end of this month. Any thoughts would be appreciated. I can post pics and links if needed.
Submitted October 04, 2017 at 06:00PM by tylaum91
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