OK guys, I'm looking for some advice on how to create a poster with photoshop (CS3).

It's to publicise a club open day and will be a montage of road, MTB and CX shots which will be printed at A3 and A4 by a commercial printer.

The montage bit I'm fairly confident I can muddle through with but I need to know what initial settings are needed and what file format it should be saved in so I can present it to the printers in a ready-to-use state.

So far I've set the document size to A3, 300dpi, CMYK colour mode, 8-bit colour. Not sure if these are all correct or if I can just use one of the default colour profiles like "Photoshop 5 Default CMYK"

Any advice gratefully received (or I could just insist that someone does it all for me… :wink:)

might be worth asking your printer what setting they use/need.
Not an expert by any means but I would use the clone tool for the montage?
Maybe create poster in publisher and then open in ps?

Sounds like a good start to me if photoshop is what you're happiest working with.

It'd be a good idea to add 3mm of bleed to the image for when it's trimmed down to A3/A4 after printing.

EDIT: changed the link to something more informative

Cheers guys.

Might be a bit more complex than I initially thought though I'll have a look at Publisher too – might be a wizard to guide me. I'll speak to a printer too.

It's called Photoshop, not Postershop.. Wouldn't have been the tool I reached for but I'm not a publisher.

Molgrips,

Photoshop is a fundamentally a bit-map graphic editor – its power lies in its versatility, whether it's creating graphic images or editing and manipulating photos. The poster will be a montage of photographs with some simple graphic elements like boxes and some text. I have a fair working knowledge of it which is why it was my first port of call.

I'm pretty confident it is fit-for-purpose, but I don't really know the best colour profiles or file formats to use since I'm not a publisher either.

Thanks for taking the time to reply though!

🙂

Yeah you can do a poster in Photoshop, but if it were me, I would do the montage in Photoshop than import it into InDesign to handle the typographic element but only because I find it easier to handle type in InDesign.

Depending on the printers, I would say a 300dpi CMYK file with 3mm bleed will be perfect. (Some digital printers prefer RGB files because of the way their printers parse the files).

Add 3mm (or if your printer is well old skool 5mm) bleed.

Create Poster, try to avoid lossy file formats during interim saves, work in photoshops own file format or TIFs with the layers left in for easy editing if you need to go back and tweak.

Creat press ready PDF (File>Print>Adobe PDF>Settings>Press ready PDF).

Just about any CMYK profile is likey to be fine.

Brilliant!

Exactly what I was looking for.

Cheers guys.

jeez some bullcrap in here ey….

300dpi for your output size
3mm bleed and work with critical design 3mm in from that
cmyk
and wtf is this crap about photoshop not being good to handle type? seriously amazed with internet warriors these days.

coming from a guy who gets 1000s of posters designed and printed a week if your wanting a cheap company thats fast print-print are good

photoshops the perfect tool, once your happy save a layed psd copy and then save a flattened pdf uncompressed and zip so its email-able and about 12mb in size.

if your stuck, im freelance 🙂
cheers
al

Photoshop is grand for what you intend as long as you keep the type fairly large. If using lots of small text then import the finished image file (minus text) into Indesign/Quark and set the text there.

It may be handier to keep the photoshop in RGB format while you are playing about as you can access a far greater range of photoshop filters in RGB mode. Just remember to convert to CMYK before saving it. (.tif file is pretty standard).

As said above make your canvas 6mm bigger all round (to allow for 3mm bleed – A4 303x216mm, A3 426x303mm) and try to keep the important info away for the edges of the poster.

Most printers prefer PDFs, which are fairly simple to create, just check your settings when saving in this format and ensure you have centred the image. Open the finished PDF and just give it a quick check to be sure you've done it right.

Do not use publisher for anything – EVER!

and wtf is this crap about photoshop not being good to handle type? seriously amazed with internet warriors these days.

I didn't say that – I said but only because I find it easier to handle type in InDesign.
🙄