Making and using a bussiness card template.

[Leigh56]

Hi

 

Windows 7

paint.net 4.0.5

 

Question--

I want to make a template of/for my business card to print. I have image/text already done. I just dont know how to make a template, put the business card image on said template (in multiples) and then print the thing. Help? Oh-graphics is a png.

[toe_head2001]

In North America, business cards are 3.5 in x 2 in. You'll want to use 300 DPI at the minimum. That said, paint.net doesn't support CMYK, so you'd be better off using Photoshop for your printed projects. You can find older versions of Photoshop super cheap, or you could use the 30 day trial version that adobe offers (I'm not sure what the license terms are on the trial).

[liramj]

Hi,

You said that Paint.net doesn't support CMYK but there is conversion plugin (3763) by BoltBait; did you try it and what do you thinck about?

Thanks

[BoltBait]

Hi,

You said that Paint.net doesn't support CMYK but there is conversion plugin (3763) by BoltBait; did you try it and what do you thinck about?

Thanks

I tried it... it is terrible.

If you really want to work in the CMYK color space, you should use a commercial image editor (Photoshop, Corel, etc.)

[david.atwell]

If you want to stay free, GIMP and Inkscape support CMYK.  However, one is very difficult to use and one is vector based.

[Eli]

Never asked myself about the differences between RGB and CMYK.  Does it mean that if I have created/edited an image in Paint.net and I want to print it on my Dell Laser printer it is best to print it directly from GIMP? Or I have to start again and edit the image in GIMP?

[david.atwell]

For day-to-day printing at home, you don't really have anything to worry about.  Printers have decent conversion software, and home printers' own general crappiness will account for more color change than the difference between RGB and CMYK.  But if you want to get something professionally printed (for instance, high-quality offset-printed business cards) CMYK files are required so that the color matches correctly.

[Djisves]

So, let's assume that I create a business card using Paint.NET. Is it enough to open this image in Gimp and save it again to convert it to a CMYK file? Or is there more to it?

[MJW]

If CMYK is something so straightforward that you could just make an RGB file then run PhotoShop or Gimp to do the conversion, how complicated could it be? And why couldn't any printing company do the same thing? I can see why individual types of printers might require special conversions appropriate to their printing process and inks, but i have difficulty understanding how some universal color-space conversion results in better printed colors.

[Ishi]

This link explains a lot.

 

http://www.printingforless.com/color.html

 

It turns out that common industry-type printers use cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) inks so pictures must also be CMYK to have maximum color match with CMYK ink. RGB modes tend to have ranges of colors that cannot be imitated by CMYK so you might have some color issues after printing.

 

And yes, its easy enough to just use a commercial photo-editing program to convert an RGB picture to a CMYK.

 

CMYK hopefully becomes natively supported on Paint.NET in the future.

Edited October 29, 2015 by Ishi

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Commercial printers these days can work with RGB. Just accept that there will be tiny variations in color. Nothing that should upset you unless you're creating a color chart or something specific of that nature.