#PRINTING GRIDS IN PHOTOSHOP FULL#
#PRINTING GRIDS IN PHOTOSHOP SOFTWARE#

Sometimes you will need to add bleed to a design that already exists, it is possible to add a bleed area using the following steps, but you must also extend any images or backgrounds to the edge of the bleed area afterwards.

InDesign’s New Document dialogue box configured to give an A4 page 3mm of bleed on all sidesĪdding bleed to an existing InDesign document

Fill this area with your design, but remember that it will eventually be cut off so do not include any important text or key parts of your image.

You can show or hide guides by pressing ‘W’ when you are not typing in a text box.

The space between the white page area and the red area is your bleed

Create your document, you should now see a red guideline around the outside of your page.

This will give a bleed area on the front and back pages but won’t affect double page spreads

If you are designing spreads you should still use a 3mm bleed on the inside of the page.

Set the bleed value to at least 3mm on all sides.

Open the ‘Bleed and Slug’ dropdown menu.

Setup Correctly: This InDesign document has both a bleed area and a margin and will help get the best resultsĪdding bleed when creating a new InDesign document Page margins are still important and we suggest that you keep text (including headers, footers and page numbers) at least 5mm away from any cut edge. The key difference is that a bleed area is not intended to be part of the design – it part of manufacturing your print and not a design element. Are bleed areas and margins different?īleed areas and margins can be easily confused until you are familiar with using them.

#PRINTING GRIDS IN PHOTOSHOP SOFTWARE#

It is important to remember that DTP software and photo editing software are intended for different purposes, for example: Adobe Illustrator and InDesign are intended for creating print-ready artwork and offer built-in support for bleed but Adobe Photoshop is an image editor intended to be used for retouching photography, so it does not have bleed functionality included.Īs Adobe software is by far the most used toolset for professional designers, we will look at adding bleed within the context of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. As a result, most desktop publishing software (DTP software) has native support to help designers create a bleed area around the page they are trying to create. Printers have been using bleed for many years – long before the advent of digital design. Notice how the background extends to the red line but there is still a generous margin between the outside edge of the design and any key elements. There should be no important text such as page headers, page footers or page numbers in the bleed area because the bleed will be cut away from the final product.Īn example image from an Illustrator file that uses bleed.

#PRINTING GRIDS IN PHOTOSHOP FULL#

What does a bleed area look like?Ī bleed area should look like a seamless extension of your design with any images or backgrounds extending across the full area of the bleed. Notice that the off-cuts all have print ‘bleeding’ on to them. How we cut down artwork that uses bleed to give edge-to-edge colour on your print. If you were to try and cut down to the colour without having extra print on the outside of the cut then you would almost always have some sheets with a thin sliver of white, unprinted paper. This ‘extra’ print is the bleed and it is essential because even the best printers are not perfectly accurate on a run of many sheets – especially when double sided printing is required. The solution is simple – print slightly more than you want to end up with, and trim down the paper in a guillotine to give you the size you need with colour flush with the edges. So how is it that almost all the high-standard print you encounter has colour to the outside edge?

You might be surprised to learn that just like your trusty home printer (yes, the one you almost chucked in the bin after it jammed for the twentieth time) almost all commercial printers have a white safety margin outside the limit of their print area. This might be a photo, a background colour or design meant to extend to the very edge of the page but the intention is always for the final product to have colour ‘edge-to-edge’ and to not have the concentric white border that you would expect from a home or office printer, especially when you are paying for a professional outcome. Most artwork comes to the shop with some graphical element reaching the outer edge of the design. While there is an old cliché about putting sweat, tears, and blood into your work – this print-production term has a much more technical explanation. Bleed is a word designers and artists will hear frequently when submitting a job for print.

Printing grids in photoshop