What File Formats Are Best for Full-Color Prints?

When you’re dealing with a printer or running off your own prints, brush up on your file format knowledge. File format refers to how data is structured and organized in a file, particularly an image or video. File formatting is advantageous to printers and designers because it compresses high-quality images for greater ease in printing, sharing, and downloading. More to the point of this article, what file formats are best for full-color prints?

Raster and Vector

Let’s begin by addressing the terms for the two major file format groups all others fall under: raster images and vector images.

• Raster images consist of pixels, those little dots of color you see when you look real close at a printed image or a screen. Separately, they look like individual boxes, but they form an image when clumped together. An elegant format going back to the pointillist movement. Regrettably, raster images become less detailed when enlarged and printed.
• Vector images are based in mathematics; they use mathematical formulas, instead of a field of dots, to create shapes and colors. Vector graphics are nifty because no matter how you scale them, they retain their visual quality.

Keep in mind that what’s good for images may not work as well for photographs. We’ll discuss this later. For now, let’s look at specific examples of these two.

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)

TIFF files are raster images. Their biggest plus is that they don’t lose quality when compressed. TIFFs accommodate most colors and are terrific for turning out high-quality prints, especially when producing photographs on a fine art printer. TIFFs, however, can be huge and may require special efforts to upload or share on a server or through digital communications.

Portable Network Graphics (PNG)

Let’s be totally transparent about using PNGs. Actually, that’s just it—PNGs are perfect for printing projects that require transparency, or making “see-through” images. If you plan to incorporate a logo but don’t want it to stand out, employ a PNG. Like TIFFs, PNGs can get a bit big as their resolution increases.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

The first thing most people think of when considering PDFs is shared documents that, usually, can’t be edited. PDFs are more than that. They’re flexible and very good for just about any printing project because they present quality images—what you see is what you get. Still, when printing, it’s wise to use the highest settings for print quality.

Encapsulated PostScript (EPS)

Have vector-based artwork? Use EPS file format. Most printers swear by EPS file format and may specifically request it when sharing files. As mentioned, scaling doesn’t affect quality, so they offer a lot of freedom if things need adjustments.

As you can see, different file formats are best for full-color prints. Hopefully, this post will help you make the right decisions for your project!