As more and more of our customers are creating there own designs, we would like to share some information that will help to ensure you are preparing your images the best way possible.

Color Management:
     By designing your own layout it is important for your monitor to be calibrated with our system for color and density because you may be choosing specific colors for borders, text, and graphic elements. We can only print from flattened images, so we can only make global corrections to your entire file. This means that if you want us to color correct for your subject's skin tones, then your border colors may get skewed from what you expected. It will be your responsibility to make sure that multi-image composites contain images that are consistent through the page, as we can not correct them individually once they are flattened and sent to us for printing.

Overall Printer Cropping:
     In order to print borderless images on photo printers, the machines are set with a certain tolerance level that takes account for any slight movements as paper travels through the processor. So, given that your image will be zoomed in about 3-5% from your original file we suggest that you leave more room around the edges of your design so that nothing is lost. There could be some clipping that occurs if you have designed borders or text that is right up against the edge of your image file.

Trader Card Design:
     When designing your own sports trader cards, it is very important to test your new layout with us before ordering a high quantity to be printed. Trader cards are the same size as die cut wallets. They are basically created by ordering a front side, and a back side, and then those sides are adhered together and die cut. Wallets are 2.5 x 3.5 inches in size, however once those get die cut you end up loosing about 1/8 of an inch all the way around the print. So we would suggest moving any critical design elements about ¼ of an inch inside the borders to account for this trimming. Again, please test your new designs for trader cards with us before you order a high quantity. The die cut mask in our ROES ordering system is just a guide and should not be used for exact measurements.

Album Design:
     Whether you are using our partner company Albums Unlimited, or another binding company to put your albums together, there is going to be some trimming of your prints when assembling the album into final presentation form. Each company should be able to provide you with the amount of print that will be lost when binding your album. They can give you guidelines to help you create final designs that will work best for printing and binding for each album size they offer. Make sure that you have this information before you get started with the design, as it may be difficult and expensive to try and make changes to your layouts later.