When I was looking for a preferred printer for The Memory Boutique, Mary and I spent countless hours searching, calling, asking questions, demanding answers and spending a LOT of money getting samples of our album pages printed. I even travelled to Salt Lake City to visit some! What did we find? First, we were highly disappointed with the quality (or lack there of!) that we received from a LOT of the printers out there. Second, so many of them wouldn't even honestly tell us the machines they used to print the pages on! Shockingly, we found out from a Xerox rep that many of these companies simply purchase a copy machine to run your pages through. Third, you don't need to spend super amounts of money to get your pages printed correctly and that are of great quality. We found the printer that does just that and so much more, which is why (click on this link to create a free account at The Memory Boutique where you can order prints and safely store your images for free!) Persnickety Prints is our preferred printer that we order all of our photo paper pages from. Why? Because they are professional, honest, genuine, thorough and precise, or "persnickety". We love them!
So to answer the question we've received so many times, "What is bleed?" I'm pleased to share with you what our printing partners over at Persnickety Prints shared about the printing process from start to finish as well as a link (found below this explanation) showing pictures of "bleed":
True Photographic Prints:
A real photograph is exposed with light on light sensitive paper. That's right - light. Photons. Some of the smallest particles in the universe.This "light" is formed by Light contained in a Laser light or LED head that "floats" over a light sensitive paper on a bed of warm air. The light exposure excites chemicals on the photographic paper by spraying tiny diamond-shaped patterns on the emulsion. It is this concentration of diamonds created from tiny photons that gives a photograph its unique look, color and depth. Ink doesn't come close.
The rest is just science. After "exciting" the chemicals in the paper's emulsion, the paper moves through a warm RA4 chemical bath which activates and seals your colors. Because the light exposure head floats over the paper there is no machine vibration to degrade the image.
Real Photographs still involve chemicals and light sensitive papers so, believe it or not, our lab technicians still go into a darkroom to load the paper we use to print your layouts. Not only that, but every time we change a roll of paper we recalibrate our machine so the colors in a photograph today will match the colors in a photograph sent a year from today.
BLEED:
For photographic prints (as stated above):
machines allow for a slight difference in print sizes and alignments by overlayingyour image over the paper to avoid having a white border. The problem with this is you can lose a good portion of the edge of your layouts. If your layout has a thin border, it can appear uneven or completely gone on one or more side. Our goal, at Persnickety, is to print your image centered evenly with as little overlay as possible.
You can be confident that your image will appear as expected as our trim is kept tightly at less than 1/16 of an inch.
Click here for Persnickety's excellent explanation of "bleed".
When you schedule a MyMemories digital scrapbooking session with us, one of the first recommendations we make is for you to get into the habit of automatically turning on the guides each and every time you create pages to make sure all of your page (the important goodies like the images and text) will be printed. The program does too, with this reminder the first time you use it:
How do you turn on the guides? On the top menu bar, select "View", "Guides" and select the appropriate "trim area" or "crop size" for your project. You'll see the shaded guides pop right on!
Now that you know what "bleed" is, you'll understand why those wonderful guides are so important. Happy scrapping!
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