Frequently Asked Questions

Absolutely. We take pride in the quality of our work — in a recent survey, 99.1% of our customers said we met or exceeded their expectations and would reorder and recommend us. If a job is unacceptable due to defects in workmanship, we will reprint and ship it to you at no cost or issue a future credit (the original run must be returned and inspected first; no cash refunds are offered). This guarantee does not cover customer errors such as low-resolution images, poor photography or incorrect copy. We print to industry-accepted “pleasing color” standards and make every effort to represent your supplied files, but we do not guarantee exact color matching. For critical jobs, a requested color proof is guaranteed to match the final printed piece within recognized industry standards.

All jobs are best suited for only certain types of paper. We will be happy to suggest the paper that would best suit your intended need, as well as a cost-saving optional paper.

Yes — we offer a complete direct mailing service. We have the latest high-speed equipment and US Post Office certified software that guarantees the lowest postage costs. We can also obtain mailing lists based on any criteria, such as homeowner status, geographical area, level of income and more.

It is easiest to email or upload your files to us. We have links on our site to help you convert your files to PDF format and then send them to us.

We accept native files from QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator. If you do not have these programs you are not out of luck — we also accept PDF files created from any program, as long as they are built correctly for commercial printing with proper file resolution and embedded fonts.

PDF stands for Portable Document Format, a universal format developed by Adobe that preserves the fonts, formatting, graphics and color of a source document regardless of the application or platform used to create it. If you created your files in an office program such as PowerPoint, Word or Publisher, saving them as a PDF is your best option for getting the files to us. Be aware that PDFs are not bulletproof — text may reflow on our end if the file was not created with fonts embedded.

Sorry, we do not accept native Publisher or Word files. These programs are better suited for projects printed on your office laser or inkjet printer, such as internal documents and presentations. However, if Word or Publisher are the only tools at your disposal, you can attempt to use them if they allow you to create a PDF. Be aware that Publisher files converted to PDF can and will most likely have a substantial change in the colors to be printed.

Your images should be 300 dpi at the final dimension you intend to use them. So if an image is 2″×2″ at 300 dpi and is then placed in a page-layout program and enlarged 200% to 4″×4″, the resolution now is only 150 dpi. Please watch out for this pitfall.

No. Most web graphics are 72 dpi, which is fine for the web, but for printing the images or files you submit must be 300 dpi at final size to ensure maximum sharpness and quality — otherwise you may see pixelation and blurriness. Do not interpolate: manually changing a low-resolution file to 300 dpi only asks the computer to add “filler” pixels and usually results in blurry, muddy images. Files created at less than 300 dpi must be recreated or rescanned at 300 dpi at final size. We only accept 300 dpi files and no less.

A bleed is a printing term that simply means there is printing going right to the edge of the paper. When that occurs, a bleed must be incorporated into your file. For example, on a 4″×6″ postcard with printing up to all four edges, you must add a 1/8″ bleed on all sides, making your file size 4.25″×6.25″. Anything outside the guides drawn 1/8″ from the edge is the bleed area and will be cut off, so keep the text and images you want to appear comfortably within those guides — with another 1/8″ inside the guides as a safety zone.

In Photoshop, make sure your images are 300 dpi at 100% of final size — not having enough resolution is the number-one image problem. Photoshop raster images are made up of a fixed number of little dots (pixels); printed at too low a resolution they appear jagged, fuzzy or soft-edged, and typing in a higher number (“upsampling”) only makes the image bigger, not sharper. If your resolution is too low, rescan rather than upsample. Adobe Illustrator, by contrast, creates vector images built from mathematical equations that can be scaled infinitely and print at the maximum resolution of the output device. As a guide, use a resolution of 1.5 to 2 times the line screen of your print job — for a 150-line screen job, your images should be between 225 and 300 dpi.

Fonts can be an issue, especially when moving a job from a PC to a Mac or vice versa. This is one reason PDF has become so popular — it is a platform-neutral format that lets you embed the fonts right into the document (please call us first to discuss the correct PDF settings). A few best practices: always use the same PostScript font from the same foundry on both platforms; do not rely on an application’s built-in “bold/italic” style buttons — choose the specific font (for example, “Helvetica Bold”) instead; avoid TrueType and cheap knock-off fonts; do not use proprietary system fonts like Chicago (convert them to curves in Illustrator if you must use them); and supply any unusual fonts to us with your job so our output device does not substitute them. There is no substitute for running a job in the software, on the platform and with the fonts it was created with — and we will work with you to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.

Probably not. Monitors display color using RGB (red, green, blue), while printing presses reproduce full-color images using CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). The RGB color spectrum is larger than CMYK, so it is possible to create colors on screen that simply cannot be printed. Work in CMYK mode (or use your program’s “CMYK Preview”) to gauge those limits. On top of that, a monitor’s age, brightness and contrast settings, the room’s lighting and — most importantly — its calibration all change how color appears, and most consumer monitors are never calibrated. Because our printing runs to SWOP standards, printed pieces usually represent truer colors. Do not trust the colors on your monitor unless it has been accurately calibrated to SWOP standards, and keep in mind that PrintFast does not guarantee color matching — if precise color is critical, we strongly recommend purchasing a hard-copy color proof.

Probably not. Your computer printout likely uses inkjet technology, where water-based inks are sprayed onto the paper. Our printing process uses oil-based inks placed onto the paper in a very different process called offset lithography, so the results will differ.

Use CMYK. Colors displayed on your screen do not always match your printed output because the two use different methods to create color. Your monitor uses projected, additive light — Red, Green and Blue combined at full strength make white. Printing uses reflected, subtractive color: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black inks absorb (subtract) certain colors from the light spectrum, and you see the light reflected off the paper and inks. Because of these different methods — plus the fact that monitors are rarely calibrated and their colors shift as they age — color mismatches between monitors and printers are common, so build your print files in CMYK.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) uses lossy compression that eliminates data deemed unnecessary, so files are much smaller and faster to upload or email — with some loss in image quality. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) preserves more image data at a larger file size. All JPEGs sent to PrintFast should be created at 300 dpi and saved at maximum quality; at those settings the losses are generally very slight and unnoticeable in the final printed piece. If you are sending your order by regular mail, or have a high-speed connection for uploading, TIFF files are recommended.