13 March 2008

Line Screen

Line screen is directly related to how fine the dots in the image will appear. Take a colour picture in a magazine and look at it under a magnifying glass you will see tiny dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink (cmyk). The line screen determines how small these dots are. The more lines per inch, the smaller the dots and finer the detail in the printed piece. If you look at a newspaper picture, you will see that the dots are much bigger than the dots in the magazine, this is because most newspapers are printed at 85 lines per inch, while most magazines are printed at between 150 and 200 lines per inch. The best way to think about it is that lines per inch translates directly to dots per inch. Piner Printing suggests that a minimum of 150 lines per inch be used. If no line screen is specified, we make all our images at 175 line per inch. As a general rule, the image should be twice the dpi of the line screen at which it will be printed. In other words, an image that will be printed at 150 lines per inch should be scanned and saved at 300 dpi at the size it will be reproduced.