Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to save a file for printing in Adobe Illustrator, and this will be for a small
project, like a flyer or a postcard. Now before we get too far into this video,
I really want you to reach out to your printer and ask them what their requirements are,
because I've worked with five or six printers over my career, and they all have different
requirements. Some want bleeds with no crop marks. Some want bleeds and crop marks. So you definitely
need to just check with your printer and see what they want. So first, I'm going to show you how to
save a document with bleeds and crop marks. Now honestly, when this gets to the printer,
they'll probably just take the crop marks off, but it allows them to see exactly where
this should be cut. And that way, there's no question about that. All right, let's get started.
Ok, so I'm going to start a new document by going to Create New. The first thing you'll want to do
is make your artboard the size of the cut flyer or postcard. So I want this one to be 4 by 6,
so I'll just type that in here. And since this one will have bleeds, I'm going to put my bleeds at an
eighth of an inch, and that is the standard size. So it's .125, and if you have this selected, it'll
automatically fill in in all these areas. And then we'll Create. So this will give us a document. Our
artboard is 4 by 6. And then we've got this little red area, then this out here is the bleed area.
So I'm going to just paste something in that I copied from another document. So I'm going to hit
CMD F or CTRL F. So it puts it right exactly where it was on my other document. This is a 4 by 6
postcard that I'm wanting to add bleeds to and, as you can see, I'm just going to zoom in here, if I
hit SHIFT O, I can see the edge of my artboard. And this comes all the way out to the edge, but
it doesn't extend over to the bleed line. And if you have bleeds, you need to extend your artwork
all the way over to that, so I'm just going to grab that black area. I don't want to move
anything else, I just want to extend the black so that it goes all the way out to the bleeds. And
I'm holding OPT now so that it'll resize both ways at the same time, top and bottom and then right
and left. So now if we zoom in, nothing here has changed. This is the same distance to the edge,
but I just extended the black out to the bleeds. And by the way, I got this postcard from
Vecteezy.com. Anyway, we're ready to save as a PDF now. So I'm going to come up here to File>Save
As. And I'll just choose PDF right down here. I'm going to call it Halloween postcard with bleed,
and it'll have pdf at the end because I chose that here. And I'll Save. Now here's where we'll set up
the bleeds and crop marks. So let's just come right over here to Marks and Bleeds.
I'm going to make sure this is checked: Use Document Bleed Settings. If you uncheck it,
you can input whatever you want. So you can manually do it that way
or you can just click this button if you've already set up your document bleeds.
And we also want Trim Marks. That'll give us crop marks. And we'll say Save PDF. Now if
we come out here and look at our PDF...I'm just going to hit CMD O or CTRL O to open that...you
can see we have our crop marks and bleeds now. So they can cut right along this line and then
cut along that line and still have plenty of area down here and on the sides to mess up,
if they don't get the cut exactly right. Now I'm going to go back to my Illustrator document.
And some printing places don't want crop marks, but they do want bleeds.
So let's make one like that. We've got our document opened up, and we've got the background
extending all the way to the bleed line. Now we'll just do Save As which is SHIFT CMD S or
SHIFT CTRL S. And I'm just going to call this one Halloween postcard and I'll call this bleeds only.
We'll save as PDF. And now the only difference is we don't want trim marks. So I'll uncheck that.
We'll continue to use the Document Bleed settings, and we'll Save PDF.
Now let's go and look at what this one looks like. This one goes all the way out to the
edge. And if we hover down here, you can see it's 4.25 by 6.25. That's including that bleed of .125
on both the right and the left sides, and the top and the bottom. That's where the .25 comes from.
If we look at our other one, this size is kind of a random size. And that's because it's including
this whitespace out here, but once this is cut, if they use the crop marks and make a perfect cut,
it'll be 4 by 6. The last thing I want to show you is, if you don't have bleeds at all,
so that means that nothing is printing up to that edge or going off the edge.
So, in that case, you're going to want no crops or bleeds, probably. You'll want to check with
your printer on that, too. So let's open one that doesn't have something going off the edge. Ok,
this is a good example. We don't have any color that's being printed up to the edge or off the
edge. All the way around, it's white. So in this case, we would want to Save As like we did before,
and we'll change our file type down here to PDF. Then I'll hit Save, and then we'll come
down here to Marks and Bleeds. Make sure neither one of these things are checked. And then we can
Save PDF. Now I do want to mention, if you want really good quality, you can change your Adobe PDF
preset here. I like to use either Illustrator Default, High Quality Print or Press Quality.
So once you hit that, like let's choose Press Quality, then I'll come here to Marks and Bleeds,
make sure nothing is checked, and I'll Save PDF. And now when we open this one in Acrobat,
we can hover down here, and you can see that it's exactly 4 by 6, so if you don't need bleeds
or crops, your final size will end up exactly the size as your document itself, unless your printer
wants you to add those for some reason. Now if you have a front and back to your postcard or flyer,
you're going to have two pages in your PDF. So you'll have a page here and then you'll have
another page that's exactly the same size with the same setup. So if one of them has crops and bleeds
your other one will have crops and bleeds, and one will be the front and one will be the back.
So that's how to save your document if it's just a small print piece
for printing. All right, if you liked this video and you want to see more videos like this,
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time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!