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neriKdesign
neriKdesign
Participant
February 13, 2018
Question

Saving transparent CMYK for printing

  • February 13, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 37658 views

What is the process for saving a CMYK image with transparency at print quality, I can't save as png.. what do I do.

Everything makes the background white.

    3 replies

    A
    Andy Swift
    Inspiring
    April 3, 2019

    You can save as a transparent TIFF file from Photoshop. Make sure that Save Transparency is checked (lower left corner in Photoshop CC 2017).

    The advantage over PSD is that you can use LZW compression for TIFF files, consuming less disk space.

    @mj
    Community Expert
    @mjCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 13, 2018

    png is good for web not print.

    if you are placing this into something like Indesign or Illustrator than Photoshop PSD works great.

    For output to printers, consider the PDF/x-1a or x-4 standards which are ISO standards.

    HTH

      T
      Test Screen Name
      Legend
      February 13, 2018

      PDF will preserve on/off transparency. Exactly what test do you do which shows otherwise? Are you looking to preserve semi transparency and if so, why?

      A
      ahmad al haj qasem
      Participating Frequently
      February 13, 2018

      Why don't you just stick with the native PSD format?

      PSD, PDF or TIFF seem like more appropriate file formats. Explaining a little more about your end goals might give us more hints as to the best solution for you.

      neriKdesign
      neriKdesignAuthor
      Participant
      February 13, 2018

      Ultimately I need to be able to upload to Vistaprint and their formats don't include PSD.

      .tiff removed the transparency, and so did PDF, unless there is a step in saving to .tiff or PDF I don't know about. But both made it like a jpg.. the transparent area turns white.

      I don't know where that window you have, appears in the saving process, when I choose to save as a tiff there is no transparency box to tick for me. I am using the latest photoshop.

      A
      ahmad al haj qasem
      Participating Frequently
      February 13, 2018

      when you choose PDF select

      High Quality Print

      Creates PDFs for quality printing on desktop printers and proofing devices. This preset uses PDF 1.4, downsamples color and grayscale images to 300 ppi and monochrome images to 1200 ppi, embeds subsets of all fonts, leaves color unchanged, and does not flatten transparency (for file types capable of transparency). These PDFs can be opened in Acrobat 5.0 and Acrobat Reader 5.0 and later. In InDesign, this preset also creates tagged PDFs.

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