Printing - getting proofs

This is not my first time printing but this is definitely the first time I've squinted at proof copies with this much scrutiny.

I mentioned on Twitter that I had got the proofs for the Kickstarter comic. And they look great at a glance.

Howeeveeer. I figured I'll show you guys what had gone wrong.

First things first, I don't blame my printer and my printer doesn't blame me. We managed to isolate the issue and it does point towards Adobe being a potato with its own exports.

My work is very detailed so maybe it's getting confused but. That's still not acceptable and I don't want my readers getting a shoddy product.

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At glance the pages look great. There's some tiny amendments I want to make. Like Morrie's shawl, the pale blue details kinda disappear. (The pages are not that yellow. Just my crappy camera phone). 

The bleeds and bind look ok on about 98% of the pages, so I'm going to amend them a tiny bit to give them more room to breathe. The cut line has gone off exactly where it should've done, so I'm really happy with that. Rich's templates are great. These are the only two spreads I'm worried about, but even they are still open enough to read.

Once we get past the flipping through and just eyeing everything over, that's where I noticed that... Quite a few faces look a bit grainy.. There's always going to be a little bit of this in all prints, but this here, is a compression issue.

What's worse, it looks terrible on text and around things like eyes.

It's like someone's decided to save my PSDs as a jpeg and then printed them. If you want to squint, you can see the grains on the export below. And in print they are even more obvious.

My printer has isolated the issue and it looks like it's a case of removing all compression settings and saving the files as TIFF instead of PSD. It's funny. Adobe can't handle its own bloody files.

Anyway. There's another proof on the way and I hope it's gonna fix this little issue!

Lesson learned?

• Get proofs if it's an option. It'll save you a lot of heart ache. Things like these are something neither you nor your printer will necessarily notice until it's on paper.
• Tell your printer if there's a problem. That's their job. To fix things.
• Never think you're a bother or settle for second best if you're concerned about something.

We'll get there!