Tips on Creating Tarpaulin Designs

Printing tarpaulins is a cost-effective way for disseminating information to a wide range of people, be it your relatives during your annual reunion, guests on a birthday party, or the public for a momentous event or activity. You can easily stretch it out against a wall or let it hang outside for everybody to see. 

However, most of us do not have the equipment to print tarpaulins, and we have to engage the services of printing companies to do the job for us. Unfortunately, in some cases, after we submitted our design to the printer and waited for several hours (or even days) for the final output, we are aghast to see that the images and colors are very different from what we saw on the computer screen. These "errors" may include pixelated images, unreadable texts, and poor print quality.

Here are some tips on how we can design tarpaulins that will reflect in their final print:

1. Open a new document in Adobe Photoshop with the actual size of the tarpaulin you want to print. This will reduce fears of pixelated images because you are working on the actual size of the print.

2. Set the resolution of the file to 72 pixels per inch, so that even though the file is set on actual size, it will not consume too much space on your hard drive. Do not worry about the file being not sharp enough; a tarpaulin file at 72 resolution is sharp enough for the public. People will look at your tarp from a distance, not up close.  

3. Use images that are comparative to the size of your tarpaulin. For 4x6 tarps, a 4 mb image will be large enough to cover 50% of your background. Of course, if you're just going to use a portion of your image, then you will have to search for higher resolution pictures. If you're using Google Images to search for applicable photos to your project, there is an option on the left side wherein you can limit the search according to the image size. This will increase your chances of finding a good image and, at the same time, getting rid of images that will pixelate.

4. Always press Shift while resizing an image; this will keep the image to its width-height ratio. You do not want a pancake version of the birthday celebrator, wherein his/her face and body is absurdly wide. It is perfectly normal for the edges of your image to go outside the canvas (just make sure that the head of the celebrator is inside).

5. Insert texts that are in high contrast with its background. For example, yellow letters are useless against a background with white clouds. Adding shadows or glows in your text (through the "fx" option on the lower right corner of Adobe Photoshop) will help to make your text stand out.

6. Avoid too much clutter. A large variety of images doesn't necessarily translate to a better output. 

7. Identify the number of eyelets (holes) you want in your tarpaulin. Your printer might forget to ask and you end up with just four eyelets over a 12x16 tarpaulin. 

8. Save the file, then flatten the whole file (right click on one of the layers and flatten), then save in PDF format. Do not save the flattened file because you might want to adjust some of the content later. However, you need to flatten the project to reduce the size of the file.