Persnickety Prints Blog: Bleed

For single page photographic prints: most machines allow for a slight difference in print sizes and alignments by overlaying your image over the paper to avoid having a white border. The problem with this is you can lose a good portion of the edge of your layouts. If your layout has a thin border, the border can appear uneven or completely gone on one or more edge. Our goal, at Persnickety, is to print your image centered evenly with as little overlay as possible.
You can be confident that your image will appear as expected as our trim is less than 1/16 of an inch.

For Example, Molly Weight AKA Biograffiti.com, printed her layouts at "another printing place" before she found Persnickety Prints.

{p.s. I love the way Molly designs her layouts. It is very clean, yet she can fit so much on a page without it looking too cluttered. Biograffiti Gridlock no. 2 layered templates make my life simple & are one of my new fav's for my personal scrapping.}

Back to the bleed comparison...

Molly created this double page 12x24 spread in Photoshop, printing each 12x12 separately.

Here is what her layout looks like on her screen.

And here is what she got from that "other printing company" ...
We used the EXACT same file and reprinted this layout for her on our machines, and with Kenny's professional personal expertise, you can't get better than this!

The Persnickety Print is on top, the "other print" is on bottom.

It is hard to show print comparisons by taking a picture of a picture, but hopefully this post will help you get the gist of it!

Also, if you look real close, you may see difference in sharpness and clarity too.... just sayin! Feel free to ask Molly:)

Remember, this bleed/trim reflects our single page prints. We are able to move, align, and adjust each layout on a computer monitor BEFORE it is printed. We then inspect each print AFTER it is printed. If we don't get it right, we print it again. That my friends, is some Persnickety Printing!

Now if you are still a bit worried, we have a solution.
Cassel from creationcassel.com has a PSP script that will create a border around your flattened or merged layout with perfectly matching colors! The width of the margin is 1/4 inch, by default, but you can change this by editing the script, so the margins will match the required specifications of the printing service you will be using. Instructions are included in the readme file... and they say the iPhone has an App for everything!

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Photo Books are a COMPLETELY different story. We can tackle Photo Books in detail on another day. Just know that bleed, borders, and alignment in a photo book print process is much different. We recommend that all of our customers use Wendy's Persnickety Prints photo book toolkit before ordering photo books.