New Year Promotional opportunities

The end of another year and time to reflect. Did you manage to create all the opportunities you had hoped for in 2005.

If not - what about 2006.

A New Year, New Resolutions, New Possibilities and many New Opportunities.

Have you let your clients know what is new or what is different or what you are hoping for in 2006. How about a promotional newsletter for the new year. Design it yourselves or we can help you to produce it easily and cheaply at the print factory in Scotland.

Why not remind them of your contact details. Telephone pads or promotional notepads can be a useful gift. Arrange to send them a promotional calendar or a quarterly calendar during the year.

Wishing you every success in 2006

and a Special Hogmanay and Guid New Year from Scotland

Gordon Flavell

www.flavell.com

Ferrari cards from Ferrari prints

I am often asked whether it is better to produce a post card or a greeting card of your favourite illustration like the Ferrari print sample below.

The Ferrari card is better in my opinion as a greeting card because

You can write in it - and there is more room to write your message
It comes with an envelope so the message is private
It has more chance of being delivered
It has a better added value
It is easier to cut up and place in a frame
It will stand on its own on the mantlepiece or table
You can make it any size not just the preferred postcard size
Can be sold in a pack of notecards

So saying all of this, each project has its own target market. You may just wish to publicise your Ferrari print with promotional notes.

Let me know if you are putting together a project with which we can help

Gordon Flavell
www.flavell.com

Ferrari takes first place

How do you make your Ferrari print from an original oil painting?

There are several ways of doing this depending on the size of your print. The simple way is to make a copy of the Ferrari picture in your flatbed scanner.

Surprisingly enough the modern scanners make a reasonable job at reproducing the saturated colours in an oil painting. They also work reasonably well with watercolours although they can miss some of the subtle hues. If you are reducing the size for your finished print then that helps as well.

The difficulty arises if :-

The original is large and doesn't fit in the scanner
or the original is in a difficult to remove frame or has a glass front
or if you need to produce a large print

In the studio we have a specialist camera back which fits on our medium format system which connects straight into our networked computer system and delivers a file size of this ferrari print of over 200 megabytes.

Realistically at home you can't do this. The best you can do is put your digital camera on its largest file size ie: the setting that gives you the smallest number of pictures. Ideally using a TIFF or RAW setting. If not use the jpeg setting.

Put the camera on a tripod if you have one. If not use something to keep the camera steady - put it on a table, wall, chair etc. Try and use available light rather than a flash since the flash will bounce the light from the glass or the frame.

Take the photo with different settings. Try auto to start with, then if this doesn't look too good try an aperture priority setting if you have one with a higher rather than lower f. stop number. Try f16 to start with. With a little practice this will give you a photo which you can make into a greeting card.

If you are going to sell your finished print it may be better to seek professional help. If you do be sure and ask to see samples of any prints they have done. Do you like the tones, the sharpness, the contrast, etc? Have they colour calibration software and does the printer of the cards have the same software as the photographer?

This illustration of the Ferrari was painted in oil on canvas and measures approx 1500mm x 500mm. The limited edition Ferrari print which we have produced is 700mm x500mm including the border and title. Copies are available and are about £20 plus postage. If you would like one I shall pass the information onto my client.

Good luck

Gordon Flavell
www.flavell.com

Why do my web site photos not look good in print?

There is an easy answer to this - however it is not so easy to fix for your Promotional Marketing and advertising projects.

Photographs published on the web typically use a screen resolution of 72 dpi. Faxes typically have a dpi count of 150 and high quality litho printing uses 300 dpi. I very simplistic terms a web image needs to be at least 6 times the size of a printed image to have a similar quality.

To compound matters a printed image is usually needed a lot bigger than web image - when was the last time you saw an A5 or 8"x6" image on your monitor?

To compound matters further web images are usually compressed to make them smaller and save bandwidth.

Although photographs and monitor resolutions are generally measured in pixels ( see my last blog ) - it is best to think of pixels and dpi as two totally separate measurements.

It is also better to think of the dpi on an inkjet printer ie:600x600 or 720, 1440 etc as yet another measurement. We output our 300dpi photographs to our printing plates at 3600dpi output resolution.

After the techie stuff - how do you fix it?

Try and take your photos at the best resolution possible
Keep the files
Downsize a copy to put on the web - Keep the original
If all else fails we have had some success at maintaining a reasonable quality so long as they are not enlarged too much.
The cost of fixing the photos is probably more than taking the photo again

Best of Luck

Gordon Flavell
www.flavell.com

How many megapixels do I need?

The more pixels the better the quality and the more you will need to pay - sometimes!

A megapixel is a million pixels - for example a square picture measuring 1000 x 1000 pixels.
If you are surfing the web this would be a huge picture probably bigger than your computer monitor. If however you wanted to print this picture it would only be twice the size of a business card.

So depending on what you want to do with your camera will depend on how many pixels you will need. If you just want to email your friends a 1 or 2 megapixel camera will be fine. If you want to keep small photographic prints then most 3 megapixel cameras will suit the purpose. All of these cameras are very competitively priced and available anywhere.

If you need better quality photographs or the ability to enlarge the photographs, there are other considerations to think about. Not all cameras with the same number of megapixels will give you the same quality photo. It is dependent on the quality of the lense, the sensor which records the picture and of course the software. Photographs are very personal and colours vary wildly - choose one where you like the tones of the sample pictures.

Currently we use a 5 megapixel compact to capture instant pictures for our web pages and also for the smallest of our range of calendars. For the larger calendars we have a number of SLR Nikon cameras with inter changeable dedicated specialist lenses.

For the purists who prefer film, I can confirm that our new Nikon D2X with 8 megapixels will compete with film until you want to take panoramic landscape and seascape photographs. However,we have our medium format camera back which has 16 megapixels to take these type of photographs. Unless you have just won the lottery, I wouldn't go down this route.

So my advice if you are looking for good average photos of normal everyday subjects look for one of the main brands with 3-5 megapixels. Make sure you have seen some sample pictures and you are happy with the total package.

I'll talk about storage next time

Enjoy taking your pictures

Gordon Flavell
www.flavell.com

Free Design Ideas

Get some free design ideas for your promotional pads and notebooks - just let us know what you are planning and we'll get back to you as soon as possible although it may take a few days. Remember to include your name and contact details and ideally your url so that we can get back to you .

Promotional Marketing

Falkirk 5th December 2005

I am grateful to Scott Paton of the Internet Marketing Centre for introducing me to blogs and podcasts.

Over the next few months I am looking forward to sharing some really great tricks for getting the best out of your own word processing and digital camera files.

Use them to jazz up your own promo material or better still save loads when you give your files over to your local printer or output bureau.

Gordon Flavell
www.flavell.com