Picture File Types

Generally speaking there are two main types of pictures… line art, and half-tone, and would usually have extensions such as JPEG, TIFF or EPS.

A line-art picture, as the name suggests, is made up of curved or straight lines only. If drawn from scratch, in a program such as Adobe Illustrator, it is an EPS “vector” file, which means that you can enlarge it as much as you want and the quality will remain the same. Or if it is a TIFF file, then although you would be limited as to how big it can be you could make it any colour you want very easily, from within the program that you are using for creating the artwork 

Half-tone images are made up of tiny dots (or pixels) each of which will be a slightly different tone or colour - the resulting effect being a full colour image. The sizing issues with EPS and TIFF files also apply with half-tones - but the most important thing about them is if they are to be printed using the litho process, that they should be CMYK are not RGB. Changing pictures from RGB to CMYK, or from colour to black and white (grey-scale), is something that can be simply done using one of the many image manipulation programs available online. It can be a complex issue - but we would be very happy to advise you. 

Software we use regularly:

We work with a wide range of software and can usually handle any type of file. For more information please also see our Document File Types Guide.