I have put together a collection of few informative terms that are used during the design process.The below terms have surfaced frequently in my discussions over the last few weeks.
EPS EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript. It contains a bitmap preview of the image as well as instructions written in the PostScript language that describe how the object is to be printed. An EPS file is usually a vector.
TIFF The raster version of EPS. TIFF can be a lossless format if you choose the No Compression option, which is the default in Photoshop. TIFF supports percentages of opacity like PNG and is ideal for the final file type of pixel-based images for print. You can also have layers in the TIFF format, but this will increase the file size.
GIF A proprietary file format from CompuServe. It is used in web graphics and is best for images that are made of solid colors, like logos. GIFs support transparency (however, pixels are either transparent or opaque, nothing in between) and they can be animated. GIFs are also considered a lossless format—meaning they do not suffer compression artifacts—as long as they do not exceed 256 colors.
PNG (PNG-24, PNG-8) Portable Network Graphics are the ideal web graphic file types. They are completely lossless and they support alpha transparency. PNG-8 is essentially a GIF.
CMYK CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, the colors a printer works with, as opposed to the screen color space, RGB. CMYK is a subtractive color space; in other words, to make white, you take away all the colors. CMYK cannot reproduce all the colors that are found in RGB, therefore when converting from RGB to CMYK, programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator etc automatically modify all the colors in the file to their nearest CMYK values. These converted colors can look either quite different or bit dull depending on what the original RGB colors were.
RGB Red, Green and Blue are a monitor’s color space. RGB color mode is used for all web graphics and designs. RGB is considered an additive color space, meaning to make white you add all the colors together.
Bleed Bleed is the part of a printed document that is outside the bounds of the final size of the piece. It is used to make sure images and other design elements print all the way to the edge of the paper. It is the designer’s responsibility to set up the bleed in a document and an accepted standard is 1/4th of an inch, outside the size of the paper, but printers can have their own specific requirements.
