Sending your zine to print

What a printer asks for

Every printer publishes a guide to the files it wants, and they are more alike than different. Read two or three and the same short list appears. A single PDF, with the pages one after another in reading order, not as spreads (two facing pages side by side). The front cover as the first page and the back cover as the last. A page count that divides by four, because a stapled zine is made from folded sheets (see Why page counts come in fours). Photographs at 300 dpi, which means 300 pixels for every inch of printed page, or roughly 1,750 pixels across an A5 page. A bleed of 3 mm. A quiet area of about 5 mm. Fonts embedded, so the printer’s computer doesn’t need your typeface installed. And colour in CMYK, which has a section of its own below.

Two of those words need explaining. The bleed is the strip of picture that runs past the edge of the page. The zine is printed on larger sheets and cut down to size afterwards, and the cut can land a fraction of a millimetre either way. If a photograph stops exactly at the edge, that fraction shows as a thin white line. So a photograph that is meant to reach the edge is made 3 mm larger on that side, and the extra is cut off. The quiet area is the opposite: a band of about 5 mm inside the edge where nothing important should sit. Page numbers, captions and the edge of a small photograph live inside it, so that the same small shift in the cut can’t clip them. The trim is the line between the two: the edge of the finished page.

Checking the PDF

The studio’s print-ready PDF is made to that list: single A5 or A4 pages in reading order with the covers first and last, a 3 mm bleed on every page, each photograph at the size its frame needs at 300 dpi, and the typefaces embedded. Crop marks (short lines at the corners that show where to cut) are optional, and many online printers don’t need them, since the bleed tells them where the edge is. Before you export, the preflight list on the Export step shows anything that could cause trouble at the printer: an empty photo frame, a photograph without enough pixels for its frame, text within 3 mm of the trim. It won’t stop you exporting, but each item is worth a look.

Once the PDF is on your computer, open it in a PDF reader and read it the way the printer’s software will. Count the pages. Check that the first page is the front cover and the last the back, and that the page count matches the number you chose, covers included. Turn through it once more looking only at the edges: is every page the same way up, and does every photograph that is meant to reach the edge actually run past it? Then upload it. Some online printers show a preview of the folded booklet before you confirm, assembled from your file. Read that too, as you would a dummy (a rough printed copy); it is the last look before money changes hands.

Alongside the file, the printer needs a handful of facts: the format (A5 or A4, portrait or landscape), the number of pages including the covers, the binding (a stapled zine is a saddle-stitched booklet in a printer’s language), the paper, and how many copies. Two things are worth asking about rather than assuming. Some printers count a heavier cover as four pages on top of the inside pages, so a 24-page zine might be entered as 20 pages plus a cover. And a zine printed on one paper throughout is a self-cover zine, which is the simplest way to print one.

Screen, ink and paper

Your photographs are made of light. A screen mixes red, green and blue light (RGB) and can show colours and deep blacks that ink on paper cannot. A press, and most digital printers, mix four inks, cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK), and every image is converted from one to the other before it is printed. Matthew Harvey, who manages production at Aperture, put it this way in a roundtable on printing: “For photography, printing in CMYK is like translating language.” The sense of the original comes through; the words are not the same. Expect the paper version to differ a little from the screen, usually a touch softer and less bright, and judge it on its own terms rather than against the monitor.

Many printers’ guides ask for files already converted to CMYK, and design software can do that. The studio’s PDF is in RGB, with each photograph’s own colour profile kept inside it, so the conversion is done by the printer’s software when the file arrives. That is also how Aperture’s own books are made: its production team sends photographers’ RGB files to a colour separator, who converts them to CMYK for the press and prints inkjet proofs set up to imitate it. If a printer’s guide asks for CMYK, ask whether an RGB PDF is accepted. Nicole Katz, a printer in the same roundtable, suggests that a photographer’s time is best spent working with the printing company’s prepress department, the people who prepare files for the press. It is the kind of question they answer every day.

The paper changes the result as much as the conversion does. The same file printed on a coated, slightly shiny stock and on an uncoated one will look like two different zines. Gerhard Steidl, who prints the books he publishes, is described in The New Yorker as disliking the shiny paper often found in photography books and preferring uncoated, even though it dries more slowly and costs more to print on. Neither is right. Paper samples from the printer, held next to a print, will tell you more than any description. A guide to choosing paper will follow.

Order one copy and read it as a reader would. Then order the rest.

One copy first

Publishers and printers agree on one thing more than any other: look at it on paper before the whole edition is printed. In Aperture’s roundtable, Katz is direct: “definitely get an accurate printed proof to make corrections from.” Danny Frank, another printer, adds the reason from the printer’s side. However good the proofing, “there is never an exact match to what has been approved”, and looking at wet ink, in different light and in a particular state of mind, changes the decisions people make. For a large edition on a press, the proof is a set of printed sheets, and the photographer is often there when it runs. David Skolkin, a book designer, says that in his experience being on press has always produced a better book. At Steidl in Göttingen, The New Yorker reports, a photographer typically makes three visits: the first to plan the book, the second to print pages and test materials, and the third to print it. The photographer Harvey Benge, visiting, found that artists are invited, in fact expected, to oversee the process in person. When John Gossage was there, Steidl printed one image three ways and Gossage chose the middle one, because, he said, it looked more photographic, more delicate.

None of that is open to someone printing 50 zines through a website, and it doesn’t need to be. The equivalent is simpler. Order one copy of the zine from the printer, on the paper you intend to use, before you order the rest. Online printers generally let you order a single copy. When it arrives, read it as a reader would, from the cover to the back. Check the things the screen couldn’t show you: how the photographs sit on this paper, whether the blacks are where you want them, whether anything near the edge has been clipped, how the fold runs through the spreads that cross it, and whether the staples and the trim are clean. Aperture’s production team, on press for Jimmy DeSana’s Suburban, checked and approved the colour on each side of each sheet against proofs that had been compared with the artist’s own prints. One copy from an online printer is the same check with fewer steps.

It helps to know what the copy can and can’t change. Frank again: on press, you are not going to change the design, the paper or the number of colours. The same is true once an order is in. If the proof shows a sequence that needs a change or a title that needs to move, the fix is in the studio, and then a new PDF. That is why the free proof and a home-printed dummy (see Making and testing a dummy) come first: they catch the sequence and the layout while it costs nothing. The printed copy catches the paper, the ink and the trim. If it shows something to fix, you can change the zine and export it again at no extra cost for 30 days after paying. Dee-Anna Chorney, speaking to the British Journal of Photography, gives the same advice in one line: get paper samples and order a few test copies to see how it feels when you have the book in your hands.

Sources and further reading

• Darius Himes and Lesley Martin, “The Fine Art of Making Things”, Aperture, The PhotoBook Review 005 (7 March 2014): Matthew Harvey on printing in CMYK as translation; Nicole Katz on an accurate printed proof and on working with the prepress department; Danny Frank on there never being an exact match, and on what won’t change on press; David Skolkin on being on press.
• Aperture, “On Press with Aperture Production” (24 July 2015): on press for Jimmy DeSana’s Suburban; photographers’ RGB files converted to CMYK by a colour separator; inkjet proofs set up to simulate the press; proofs compared with the artist’s original print; colour checked and approved on each side of each sheet.
• Rebecca Mead, “The Book Monk”, The New Yorker (22 May 2017): a photographer’s three visits to Göttingen; John Gossage choosing between three versions of one image; Steidl’s preference for uncoated paper.
• Harvey Benge, “Gerhard Steidl, Master Publisher” (12 April 2011): artists invited, in fact expected, to oversee the printing in person.
• British Journal of Photography, “How to create a ground-breaking photobook” (2017): Dee-Anna Chorney on getting paper samples and ordering a few test copies.