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Adding full color graphics to vinyl banners will give your banner designs with greater impact and a much more high quality appearance. Putting a full color photograph on your vinyl banner is often the easiest way to do this.

When you intend to add a photo or illustration to a large banner design, try to keep a number of things in mind. For the image to look crisp and clear it must have the most appropriate resolution. For most large display projects such as vinyl banners, display backdrops, window graphic, and popup displays, a resolution of about 100 ppi (pixels per inch) at full size is sufficient.

In other words if you have an original image that is 300 ppi at 8" x 10",then this image can be blown up to roughly 24" x 30". That will give you a finished resolution of 100 ppi. In fact you can often go as low as 50 ppi and still get good quality output, because these images are normally created to be viewed from a distance of at least 10 feet away.

Second, you should almost always brighten up the colors of your images. One way to do this is to increase the contrast. If you use Photoshop the easiest way to do this is by "pinching" the levels controls. Open the levels control window and pull the control for the shadows towards the middle (to the right). Then pull the control for the highlights to the left. This will brighten your light colors and darken your dark colors while clearing up some of the "mudiness" of the mid tones.

You can also brighten your images by "sharpening" them. Your images will normally appear much crisper and sharper when you "punch them up" with a bit of sharpening. But don't go overboard.

Last but not least, we recommend working in CMYK mode rather than RGB. Vinyl banners are almost always printed on CMYK printing devices with solvent inks. Rather than counting on the printing system to make the conversion (RGB is the default color system used on the computer) convert the images yourself so you can see what you are going to get. RGB can be misleading since it has a broader color "gamut" than CMYK.

What that means is that there are colors you can see on a computer monitor that you simply cannot reproduce with CMYK inks especially not with solvent inks on a material such as vinyl. You might as well know this before you get the printing done. If it is important to reproduce a specific color and if you have time a proof can be printed on the actual vinyl banner material to give you a clear picture of how the finished product will look.

Another important point to realized is that the choice of ink will have an impact on the durability of the job. It is usually advisable to use true solvent inks for outdoor projects because they are ideal for full color printing intended for use in harsh sunlight or other potentially harmful weather conditions such as rain or snow.

Solvent inks do not fade as quickly when exposed to UV rays, and stand up to wind and rain much better. Non solvent inks will fade much faster in direct sunlight. Even for indoor projects it is often better to use solvent-based inks because they produce a much more durable final result. This is especially important for situations that require graphics which will likely be rolled and unrolled many times, and be subjected to a lot of handling.

For more advice on producing graphics for trade shows and displays contact the large format printing experts at TradeShow-Display-Experts.com