Help preparing business card for print. Size and bleed issues?

W00DY

Hi All,

I am not sure if this is going to make much sense but I will give it a go...

I finished designing my business card and need to get it ready for print. The printing company I am going to use provided a template which, working in pixels, is 1087 (h) x 709 (w) (it is a vertical card).

I have this image which I want to use which is fairly tightly cropped and is 3024 x 1998. Image below is the front of the business card (including title)



My problem is that the printers said I needed to "fill" the business card (1087x709) even though the actual card size is 1017x639 to allow for bleed and off cut. If I resize the original image to "fill" the card I cut of the girls toes in the printable area, this is no good for my card.

I am not sure if there is anyway around this? I really want to use this image on my cards but I need to work out a way where I can fit the entire image in the full size but include all the girls toes in the printable area...

Does that make sense? Sorry I am not very good at explaining these things.

if you have ANY help it would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Andrew

Art Scott

go into photoshop make a layer/background to work on....place your photo on this"mat"....now eith clone the image to fit or make a colored border if you need to keep all of your image....

Now when your "resizing" are you keeping constrain proportions ticked...that may also help you.....I understand your dilemma as I have been there before.

digismile

So this is the full width on the original photo? (i.e. you added length, but are using the full width?)

Then Art's suggestion is about all you have. You basically need to add 70 pixels on each side. I would simply change the image size to the 1017 x 639, then increase the canvas size to the final desired image size of 1087 x 709.

Then you're free to clone, or copy a rectangular selection on each side from the existing image. Not too hard, but a bit tedious to get the edges/transitions correct.

Obviously, the easiest solution would be to redo the card, assuming you have more width on the original photo.

W00DY

digismile wrote:

So this is the full width on the original photo? (i.e. you added length, but are using the full width?)

Then Art's suggestion is about all you have. You basically need to add 70 pixels on each side. I would simply change the image size to the 1017 x 639, then increase the canvas size to the final desired image size of 1087 x 709.

Then you're free to clone, or copy a rectangular selection on each side from the existing image. Not too hard, but a bit tedious to get the edges/transitions correct.

Obviously, the easiest solution would be to redo the card, assuming you have more width on the original photo.

Hi Brad,

The original width of the image is 1998 pixels... I think the problem is that the original image is very tightly cropped (ie: the girls toes are almost at the edge of the image, both sides) so if I resize the image to fit within the card size, which I have to do to include her toes, then there is no image left for the bleed section.

I think Arts suggestion is what I need to do. Resize the image for the card and then clone sections out of it to fill up the bleed section.

Cheers, I'll see how it goes.