4.2 Print Marks

In this lesson, we'll explore the printing marks options that we have in our Photoshop print settings dialog box. One of the most common cases where you'll need print marks, are when you're in a graphic design situation or commercial printing situation and you're prepping your images directly in Photoshop. Let's head down to that section where it says Printing Marks and click on the arrow on the left-hand side and it'll expand your options for you. Now the Corner Crop Marks shows the boundaries of the printed area and where the file should be cut or trimmed to its finished size. So we'll go ahead and select that, and you'll notice some very subtle lines appeared in each corner of this image. Now, just a quick note about bleeds. A bleed is simply when the color of an image runs all the way to the edge of a sheet of paper, so If an image does not have color that goes to the very edge of the paper, then the image does not have a bleed. Printers cannot print color all the way to the edge of a piece of paper, which means the unprinted white edges will need to be trimmed off. It's for this reason that if you want your image to print with bleeds, you'll want to set your canvas size to at least an eighth of an inch larger on each side. And this measurement can vary depending on the printer that you're using. Now center crop marks serves as a guide, if you need it, to fold your image. It prints marks at the center of each side of the print. And so if you go ahead and select that, you'll notice that we have a mark at the top of our image and here at the bottom of our image. Now the registration marks are for aligning the color plates of a separation on post script printers. This includes bullseyes and star targets. In most cases, you will not need these, but if you go ahead and select it, you'll see that we have bullseye targets that appeared in each corner of our image. And the description prints a description of your choice up to about 300 characters and it's always going to be in nine point Helvetica plain type. And so you would select that. And then under edit, this is where you would input your description that you want printed with the document. We'll select cancel and finally we have labels. If you select labels, it'll print with the name in the title bar of the document window. It's unlikely that you'll need print marks for desktop printing, so we'll actually leave these options unchecked. However, they're good to be familiar with in case you encounter them for a commercial job. So that brings us to the end of this lesson. In this lesson, we explored our printing mark settings. In our next lesson, we're going to discuss some ways to proof our image before printing it.