StickerGiant.com, an innovator in the field of custom stickers and custom printing, offers important advice and tips for adding bleed to images and documents created using Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator.
Setting up a design that will be printed is different than creating a design that will be used in other applications. Ensuring that your image translates from computer to final print with the highest quality possible is essential. One of the most important elements of this is to add bleed to the design. Essentially, bleed is the area of your image or design that extends beyond the actual borders of the document. The purpose of bleed is to eliminate any white edges around the design.
First, open the file in Photoshop and then double check the image size. Go to Image and then Canvas Size to determine the size of your image. Essentially, adding bleed simply means extending the image beyond the cutline. For instance, if you are printing a 9.25 x 2.5 sticker, you would need 1/8-inch bleed on each side of the image. To do this, simply add 1/4-inch to the canvas size and make the total 9.5 x 2.75. The resulting empty space will be the area where the bleed goes.
You can use the clone stamp tool to extend the image to the new edge of the document. To avoid using the brush tool, you can make another layer, fill it with your preferred color and "send to back." Finally, flatten the image and save it as a PDF.
In Illustrator, you simply need to extend the vectorized artwork past the cutline, allowing the background color to bleed off the edge of the document. Fill in any areas that need to be, and scale the artwork within a 1/8-inch safety margin. Simply save your file as a PDF and you are finished.
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