Welcome to this guide in preparing your designs for poster printing. In this article I will teach you how to prepare the various aspects of your print posters so that they can be prepared for professional poster printing. There are five aspects of your color poster draft that you need to focus on. The first one is the dimension.

1. Use standard poster dimensions. First, you should try and set the dimensions of your color posters to the standard values. Trust me when I say this. Your color poster printing will be faster, easier and cheaper if you do this. Most professional poster printing companies appreciate people using standard dimensions because most of the machines and even paper materials are now standardized. So whenever possible, set your poster drafts with standard poster printing dimensions. Try to download free poster templates to know what the standard poster printing dimensions are.

2. Do not forget to include bleeds. It is also important to add printing bleeds to your draft in preparation for poster printing. Most professionals add printing bleeds to make sure that the printing and cutting of the poster looks right. Just try to add one quarter of an inch of dimension to all sides of your color posters to get a good printing bleed. Your posters should look better when you do this since there will be no obvious discrepancies in the edges of your color posters.

3. Mind the color mode of your draft file. You should also prepare your draft file for printing by setting the correct color mode. For web designs, the RGB color mode is preferred. However, for poster printing CMYK is the appropriate mode since it is also the typical printing process used for production. So always set your poster design to CMYK color mode before sending it up for printing. This should give you a more accurate picture of what the true colors of your posters will look like and the printing company should have no troubles in converting your file.

4. Check your resolution. Another important thing you must mind is the image resolution. Many professional poster printers send back designs to printing clients because of bad image resolutions. This is because low resolution designs will appear fuzzy and will show the image pixels when printed in a full color poster. So it is imperative that you check your poster designs if they are set to 300dpi resolution or higher. If it is lower, you should try to resize and convert your file so that it is appropriate for poster printing.

5. Create drafts in multiple file formats. Finally, you should create drafts in multiple file formats before sending them off to your poster printer. A document format should be okay as your main draft. A Photoshop document file (.psd) or something similar should be alright. Also, image formats such as .jpg files and .png files are also good for backups and emergencies. If you have a fast internet connection, you might want to also include a full .bmp image that is larger usually but has the best quality. Send all these to your professional poster printing company to cover all your bases in printing and minimize conversion or compatibility errors.

Now you know how to prepare your color posters for professional printing. You should have little problems now in creating your full color posters.