Comments on: Adding Bleed to a Document

By: Letitia

Letitia — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:31:26 +0000

Please help me , how do I add bleed around an object in Indesign on a page, like having a shape with a cutcout and bleed around that? can you help?

By: Business process automation

Business process automation — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:14:00 +0000

Thanks a lot for then information

By: Lee

Lee — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:15:10 +0000

I’ve always used 3mm in general, though some places I’ve known use 4mm.

I always use 5mm bleed in Photoshop, to allow plenty of room for the edge of the document affecting layer styles (for example, angled drop shadows will visibly stop at the edge of the document, unless the image extends beyond the edge of the document). This is only for full-page images that bleed off the edge, obviously.

By: ceramic print

ceramic print — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:12:00 +0000

We use a 5mm bleed on everything. This may seem a bit excessive but we never know if a job might be shrunk down and re-printed at a reduced size at a later date, at which time a standard 3mm bleed may well have shrivelled away to nothingness.

By: Jøhn

Jøhn — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:30:31 +0000

By: Roland

Roland — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:05:45 +0000

I always ask for 4 to 5mm of bleed and crop marks as I usually have to place the PDFs in InDesign to tile them prior to printing — we do small runs on a simple Canon copy-printer comparable to Xerox’ 240 for those interested. Once placed I can then remove some of the bleed when necessary by simply changing the placed PDF’s frame size.

The big bugger though is that a lot of folks who actually use Adobe software and believe they know what they’re doing — as opposed to the larger group who think Word, Excel, PowerPoint and *shoot me please* Publisher are perfect for making posters, business cards and the like — still refuse to set up bleeds entirely, or they make bleeds the size they want, resulting in me having to call them for new files every single time.

By: Indesign training

Indesign training — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:59:32 +0000

and choose a good printer – I don’t have much joy discussing belled with kinkos. LOL

By: Jerome

Jerome — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:20:35 +0000

Eugene,

1/4″ is extreme but I have had a number of printers request it. I have also had printers request different bleed for top, bottom, and left/right bleeds when working on covers. If I don’t have the specs up front in the design process I like to use 1/4″ bleed for interior pages and 1/2″ for covers just to be sure, you don’t have to use all of it. It’s better to have the the extra there than to have fake it or clone it in after everything is designed.

And as for the metric, I used it when I was working for NATO in Italy, but that was quite a while ago and I have not used metric measures since. When designing I typically use points and picas.

By: JT

JT — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:00:03 +0000

As a prepress guy, I must stress that designers need to learn what bleeds are and when to use them! InDesign makes it so simple to set values for bleeds and to turn them on and off.

My shop likes .125″ bleeds, but things that die-cut usually need .25″ bleeds.

Yes, some paper is wasted, but it will be wasted regardless. Very rarely do we not have to trim something after it is printed. Adding bleeds means that a paper cutter has some wiggle room.

If you don’t add bleeds, someone will have to in prepress, by dragging out your solid shapes or doing surgery on your photos. Save us this headache and add bleeds.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:38:04 +0000

1/8″ is roughly 3mm, Jerome.

1/4″ seems a bit extreme.

I think for bleed they were talking explicity about the body and normal covers, however, on harback covers it’s common to put 20mm bleed for the wrap around, at least for all the hard back covers I’ve done that’s been the norm.

Always wise to talk with the printers before commencing any project where you’re not sure and get their specs and requirements.

The question about bleed and margins etc. always come up. Perhaps they can be covered in a podcast or videocast?