TIPS ON CREATING

TARPAULIN DESIGNS
 Printing tarpaulins is a cost-effective way for disseminating
information to a wide range of people, be it your relatives during
your annual reunion, guests on a birthday party, or the public for
a momentous event or activity. You can easily stretch it out
against a wall or let it hang outside for everybody to see.
 However, most of us do not have the equipment to print
tarpaulins, and we have to engage the services of printing
companies to do the job for us. Unfortunately, in some cases,
after we submitted our design to the printer and waited for
several hours (or even days) for the final output, we are aghast to
see that the images and colors are very different from what we
saw on the computer screen.  These "errors" may include
pixelated images, unreadable texts, and poor print quality.

TIPS ON CREATING TARPAULIN DESIGNS

 1. Open a new document in Adobe Photoshop with
the actual size of the tarpaulin you want to print. This
will reduce fears of pixelated images because you are
working on the actual size of the print.
 2. Set the resolution of the file to 72 pixels per inch, so
that even though the file is set on actual size, it will not
consume too much space on your hard drive. Do not
worry about the file being not sharp enough; a
tarpaulin file at 72 resolution is sharp enough for the
public. People will look at your tarp from a distance,
not up close.

TIPS ON CREATING TARPAULIN DESIGNS

 3. Use images that are comparative to the size of your
tarpaulin. For 4x6 tarps, a 4 mb image will be large
enough to cover 50% of your background. Of course,
if you're just going to use a portion of your image, then
you will have to search for higher resolution pictures. If
you're using Google Images to search for applicable
photos to your project, there is an option on the left
side wherein you can limit the search according to the
image size. This will increase your chances of finding a
good image and, at the same time, getting rid of
images that will pixelate.

TIPS ON CREATING TARPAULIN DESIGNS

 4. Always press Shift while resizing an image; this will
keep the image to its width-height ratio. You do not
want a pancake version of the birthday celebrator,
wherein his/her face and body is absurdly wide. It is
perfectly normal for the edges of your image to go
outside the canvas (just make sure that the head of
the celebrator is inside).
 5. Insert texts that are in high contrast with its
background. For example, yellow letters are useless
against a background with white clouds. Adding
shadows or glows in your text (through the "fx" option
on the lower right corner of Adobe Photoshop) will
help to make your text stand out.
TIPS ON CREATING TARPAULIN DESIGNS
 6.Avoid too much clutter. A large variety of images
doesn't necessarily translate to a better output.
 7.Identify the number of eyelets (holes) you want in
your tarpaulin. Your printer might forget to ask and you
end up with just four eyelets over a 12x16 tarpaulin.
 8. Save the file, then flatten the whole file (right click
on one of the layers and flatten), then save in PDF
format. Do not save the flattened file because you
might want to adjust some of the content later.
However, you need to flatten the project to reduce the
size of the file.

TIPS ON CREATING TARPAULIN DESIGNS