What's best for Dig Printing-design software?

[markz]

Greetings, what's being used in the Signs101 community to do designs, lettering effects,etc for sending to a vendor to produce dig. prints for signage & vehicle application ?
Currently, Signwizard isn't the best for this, but we do "tweek" jpeg's in Photoshop7 & "jazz" up the colors occasionally. But, we need to produce better quality designs for large prints, like banners etc. not "part" of the job dig. printed combined with lettering, you know the really sharp stuff.
thanks upfront ! mark Z

 

[Pro Signs & Graphix]

the really sharp stuff

Please define the context. Are we speaking of vectors when you say "sharp" or are we speaking of flashy layouts?

 

[player]

I think the Adobe design suite- mainly photoshop for bitmaps and Illustrator for vector and vector plus bitmaps. Also Corel is used, but I think the Adobe stuff is better.

Others use Flexisign to do some designing in, as well as assembling parts from all the above progies. It will allow superior printing and print/cut as well.

Cheers,

P

 

[Flame]

Hey bud, I have Illy CS2, Photoshop CS2, CorelDraw X3 and FlexiPro 8.0v2.... I have others as well but those are my main four that I use. I use Photoshop for raster imaging and cleanup, CorelDraw for general purpose work (75%) and almost all of my vector work. I use Illustrator for hand drawing stuff, and I use Flexi for production. All work that is done in Illy, PS and Corel ends up in Flexi for printing/ cutting. I love how Flexi is so easy to use to manage files to production, but hate it as a design program.

That's how we roll here. If I had to be stuck with only ONE program... I'd say good ole' CorelDraw 8 with CoCut Pro. lol. Not the latest or greatest... but dayum it works well.

 

[markz]

thanks to all, So let's see if i got this,..... hey, i just turned 49,so i'm a "hair" slower, first you do the entire layout,design,text,effects etc. in above programs ....then send or export to the dig. print source. meaning inhouse or online sub,right?
thanks MZ

 

[Checkers]

Yep Mark, you are correct. But, imho, it's personal preference.
As much as I like Corel, I have to admit that Adobe products are considered the standard that is used by most job shops. So, building your design in Photoshop or Illustrator will give you the least amount of potential headaches when it comes to reproduction. Also, if there are issues, your vendor may be able to make corrections for you.
That being said, I can do just about anything in Corel and export it to whatever format is required by my vendors, TIF, EPS, PDF, etc. But, if there is a problem with my file, I normally can't rely on my vendor to make the necessary changes or adjustments to get the job into production. And this could potentially delay the project.

Checkers