No. Our product provides a very good-quality image while taking advantage of cost savings and quick production schedules. Please read below if you are an artist or a photographer.

The process of printing on press is different from the photographic printing process. The fundamental difference is the use of halftone screens utilized in printing to simulate gradual tonal values in an image. Compared to a halftone image, the photographic printing process is able to recreate a range and depth of blacks and grays in a greater resolution than is available via a standard offset press. In addition, the darkroom process allows for special techniques, such as burning, dodging, and varying exposure times, to allow photographers to achieve the perfect print.

Offset printing reproduces a similar likeness of the photographic image, but may have a 5-10% tonal variation in the image during the press run. In gang-run printing, individual jobs may be influenced by the surrounding jobs sharing the same run. If you are printing a black-and-white image, CMYK conversion of the image may result in a warm or cool color shift. The color shift may be minor, but the printed product may not match the tone of your photographic print. If you opt to print as a grayscale image, there is a high likelihood that a small amount of spotting will occur in your solid black areas.

Rocket Postcards serve many photographers as an excellent general marketing tool to their clients. Our product allows customers to take advantage of cost savings and quick turnaround times; typically, critical color printing of fine-art-reproduction-quality products costs significantly more and usually takes a minimum of a week to ten days.

Rocket Postcards uses a digital press with a 150lpi resolution. This provides a good-quality image, but does not produce the highest-quality image available on the printing market. Specialty print vendors exist who work exclusively with photographers to produce sample cards-- obviously, at a much greater cost than a gang-run printer such as Rocket. If you are looking for fine-art-reproduction-quality of your work, we recommend not using a gang-run printed product for your samples.

For many artists, the postcard is an excellent promotional tool. The most common concern for artists is representing their work and the exact color of their work. While steps can be taken to produce a good-quality postcard, if you need to match the exact color of your piece, you may want to consider working with a fine-art-reproduction-quality printer to achieve your color results. Due to the nature of gang-run printing, Rocket cannot provide critical color matching services.

Here are some steps that can be taken to help create a good-quality postcard. First, it is highly recommended to have your artwork shot professionally by a photographer and then have a professionally-scanned image prepared for you to use for your printing needs. Second, create a design which complies with the design guidelines for our postcards. Keeping items away from the edges, creating clean and clear type, and organizing the items within your design will result in a card that is a successful promotional piece. Last, you may want to order a proof, or print a color copy of your card at least once before printing, since onscreen color looks very different than colors created by CMYK printing inks.

Rocket Postcards uses a digital press with a 150lpi resolution. This provides a good-quality image, but does not produce the highest-quality image available on the printing market. Specialty print vendors exist who work exclusively with artists to produce sample cards-- obviously, at a much greater cost than a gang-run printer such as Rocket. If you are looking for fine-art-reproduction-quality of your work, we recommend not using a gang-run printed product for your samples.

Rocket Postcards serve many artists as an excellent general marketing tool to their clients. Our product allows customers to take advantage of cost savings and quick turnaround times; typically, critical color printing of fine-art-reproduction-quality products costs significantly more and usually takes a minimum of a week to ten days.

There are some colors that print well on Rocket, but gray is not one of them. In fact, tints of black are converted to CMYK, and many tonal mixes in 50-60% range will sometimes result in banding or zoning. Further, CMYK mixes within the 50-60% range experience some color shifts on press due to the fact that our print jobs are put together on gang-runs, and surrounding jobs can influence the color of your job. Colors that tend to shift include tans, grays, yellow ochres, spring greens, and burnt oranges. Generally, the more similar the values of your CMYK mix are, the greater variation your color will suffer.

Large flat areas of solid colors, or tints of colors, tend to show the most obvious color variations on gang-runs. In 40-60% mixes of gray, the color is created with a CMYK mix and may produce a visual effect wherein you can see the individual colors that make this mix. If you would like to run a critical color match job, or would like a custom color mix, please contact our sister company, Nomad Printing (www.nomadprinting.com). Rocket Postcards will not reprint a job which has a gray mix because a client is unhappy with the gray print result. If a critical gray match is desired, we highly recommend doing a custom print run with Nomad Printing.

Rocket Postcards reviews files for technical errors/problems which will result in the job not being able to be printed on our presses, such as trim violations, layout size, fonts, image resolution and unacceptable file formats. Rocket does not review files for design errors, typos, misspellings, or postal regulation compliance, nor do we comment on design decisions made by the client. If you are not happy with the layout of your product, we can assist you with some design tips, show you samples of other clients' cards, and refer you to on-line design resources to help you prepare design files for future orders.

Some general design decisions that produce poor results are: - thin borders and images too close to the edges - type smaller than 9pt created in a CMYK mix Ð (for crisp type, use 100% black) - reversed type smaller than 10pt - fine lines under .5 pt (the result will be a less-than-crisp line which looks misregistered) - photographs from digital cameras - mismatched "blacks" using different CMYK mixes - very thin white type reversed out of black or dark backgrounds - small type with drop shadows

If you would like to have your card designed, please read about our design services on our Services page

Rocket Postcards are printed in CMYK, the standard process printing inks. Many design programs use different color swatches to allow designers to pick colors. Not all of these colors can be represented by our printing inks, and we highly recommend using a Pantone-PMS-to-Process conversion swatch book to see what your converted colors will look like. For more information on available swatch books please visit www.pantone.com.

Remember that your onscreen colors are not the same as printed colors. The reason for this is that monitors use projected light created with RGB color, whereas printed materials use CMYK inks which reflect colors. For more information on the science of color, we recommend visiting www.adobe.com. In the meantime, there is an excellent book called "Computer Color" by Michael and Pat Rogondino with hundreds of color samples printed in CMYK inks. This is an easy-to-use resource for designers who want to know what the color will really look like when it prints.

If you would like to use a custom PMS color or a metallic color such as silver, please request an estimate from our sister company Nomad Printing.

No. Engraving is a high-end specialty printing process that is an extremely customized and labor-intensive service. If you are looking at a printed sample which has "slightly raised" type or lines, it was either engraved, or was created via thermography (a low-cost type of engraving).

No. Take a magnifying glass and look closely at a printed sample. If its colors are not made up of little dots, then you are probably looking at a custom print job created by using special mixes of ink. If you see flat color, then it is a custom color. If you see little dots of light blue, pink, yellow, and black, then you are looking at a process printing (or CMYK) job.

No. If your very fine lines are made of one of the CMYK print colors, then they will print sharply only if they are greater than 1 pixel thick. If the line is a color made from a CMYK blend, there is a chance that you will see a slight shift in registration when you go below a 1-point stroke width on your lines. Dotted line, fine line work, and very small type created in colors that use all four CMYK colors will result in small shifts of a .5-pixel variation on press, and very small items will show this shift if not properly trapped.

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