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West Coast Leaf: Full Page AdRegular Black and White Price, $2000 Full Color Price, $2400 |
West Coast Leaf: Three-quarters Page AdRegular Black and White Price, $1650 Add Full Color, $1980 |
West Coast Leaf: Half Page AdRegular Black and White Price, $1250 Full Color Price, $1500 |
West Coast Leaf: Quarter Page AdRegular Price Black and White, $725 Full Color Price, $870 |
West Coast Leaf: Eighth Page AdRegular Black and White Price, $420 Full Color Price, $504 |
West Coast Leaf: Double Business Card Size AdRegular Black and White Price, $275 Full Color Price, $330 |
West Coast Leaf: Business Card Size AdRegular Black and White Price, $150 Add Full Color Price $180 |
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For cleaner blacks and tones in color advertisements: Finish your artwork using CMYK mode, not RGB (that mode is used by your monitors and the Internet). Newspaper presses use four print runs to make color images: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). Blended images use multiple overlays of color to make the black portions, but too much ink on the paper makes images look smeary and increases the risk of visual disruption by misaligned color plates. (For more on this, see below.)
Do this: Drag the Photoshop control bar pulldown menu to the "Image / Adjustments / Selective Color" to open the command window. Select "Blacks." If mostly photo output check the "relative" button at the bottom of the box, or click on "absolute" for mostly graphic and font output. Raise the black ink levels to +75% to +85%, and slide down all the other color settings range to -25%, -35% and lower. Use the preview checkoff box to see how far you can go without hurting the integrity or realism of the image. Set the image size to the specified dimensions of your ad at 200-300 lpi. Save the file, and email it to our offices.
Ink Density: One of the best things you can do to improve newsprint color reproduction is to properly set the ink density. The sum of the percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black used in the darkest areas should not exceed 220%. Files submitted with ink densities higher than 220% will be automatically converted and may experience unexpected color shifts.
By default, Photoshop uses a magazine ink density of 300%. So using a Photoshop default setting, a near-black shadow area in a photo might have a CMYK breakdown similar to C: 75% M: 62% Y: 68% K: 90% (A total of 295%.) That's more ink than newsprint can handle. The excess ink that the paper can't absorb spreads out, smears and transfers to the opposite page much like a rubber stamp. So not only does that one image with too much ink density look dark and muddy, but the whole spread in the newspaper becomes an inky mess. You can change the default Photoshop settings by selecting Color Settings … from the Edit menu. In the Working Spaces section, select CMYK: Custom CMYK… and change the settings.
Our recommended settings are pictured below. For proofing, you can check the ink density on PDF files using Adobe Acrobat (not Acrobat Reader) using the Output Preview dialog box. At the bottom of the panel, turn on Total Area Coverage and change the default 280% to 220%. Anything that turns bright green is too dense. If nothing highlights green, your maximum ink density is correct.
Dot gain: Because of the high absorption characteristics of newsprint, images will see a significant amount of dot gain. Dot gain in Washington Business Journal is approximately 35%-38%. Also, dot gain is not linear — the greatest growth is in the midtone. You cannot eliminate optical or mechanical dot gain — you must compensate for this effect in your images and flat tints. Without the required change, your ad will appear dark and muddy. Resolution: All continuous tone images (such as photos) should be around 200 dpi at their final output size. Remember, changing the scaling of an image in your layout program changes the effective resolution. A 200 dpi image scaled up to 200% has an effective resolution of only 100 dpi. Bit-mapped or "line" art (common for logos in the 1980s and ’90s, less common today) should be around 1,200 dpi or higher.
