Sending Work to the Printer
Dylan Mierzwinski · Illustrator & Lover of Flowers
A lecture-heavy print-prep course that trades hands-on speed for the reasoning behind bleeds, gamuts, and spot colors you'll actually retain.
What it actually covers
Dylan Mierzwinski frames this course around a specific complaint: work that looks great on screen and disappoints on paper. The opening lessons spend real time explaining why printing feels opaque in the first place, walking through six printing methods (offset, digital, flexography, silkscreen, letterpress, thermography) and the tradeoffs between traditional print shops, print-on-demand services, and home printing. This is not filler. Knowing that sheet-fed offset supports true spot colors while a home inkjet might actually have a wider gamut than a commercial press changes what questions a designer asks before submitting a job.
The color section is the intellectual core of the class. Rather than reciting that RGB is for screens and CMYK is for print, it explains color gamut through a crayons-versus-colored-pencils comparison, then separates color model from color space, using sRGB versus Adobe RGB to show that the same numeric color value can render differently depending on the space it lives in. It is a slower path to the same information most tutorials give in a single slide, but it produces an actual mental model rather than a rule to memorize.
Where the execution lives
The back half turns practical. Bleed setup gets demonstrated in both Photoshop, where bleed has to be added manually to canvas dimensions, and Illustrator, where it is a built-in field in the new document dialog. The Photoshop color-channel work is the most technically dense stretch of the course: building a spot channel, filling it with a saved selection, exporting to PDF, and then using Acrobat's Print Production tools to verify ink coverage percentages and catch process colors bleeding through underneath a spot color. Watching total area coverage drop from 300 percent to a safer number after knocking out hidden layers is a concrete, transferable skill that print production professionals actually use.
The exporting lesson closes the loop with PDF/X-1a settings, font outlining, transparency flattening, and Illustrator's file-packaging feature for collecting fonts and linked images before handoff.
Strengths and limits
The course's own framing, heavy on lecture before any demonstration, is also its main limitation. Viewers wanting to jump straight to bleed settings or export dialogs have to sit through the theory first, though the video titles do make it easy to skip ahead on a rewatch. The color chapter occasionally repeats itself, and a few moments feel more like personal reassurance than instruction.
What earns the course credit is honesty about its own scope. It does not claim to make anyone a print expert, and the closing lesson, a story about a door hanger printed with the wrong phone number and a warehouse crew trimming boxes of them by hand, is a useful reminder that proofing and communication matter as much as technical settings. For a designer who has submitted a file and gotten back murky colors or a rejected proof, this is a genuinely clarifying watch. For someone who already understands CMYK conversion and just needs a five-minute refresher on Illustrator's bleed field, it will feel padded.
The standout
The Photoshop walkthrough on building a spot color channel, then using Acrobat's Output Preview to check ink coverage percentages and knock out process colors hiding underneath a spot color, is the single technique worth the whole runtime.
What you will learn
- Distinguish offset, digital, flexography, silkscreen, letterpress and thermography printing and pick the right one for a job's volume and budget
- Tell CMYK from RGB, understand color gamut and color space, and know when to supply which to a printer
- Set up resolution and canvas bleed correctly in both Photoshop (manual bleed math) and Illustrator (built-in bleed field)
- Build and apply spot color channels in Photoshop, including knocking out process colors beneath a spot color to control ink coverage
- Choose flat black versus rich black CMYK values to prevent ghosting on fine lines and add weight to large dark areas
- Export a print-ready PDF/X-1a, outline fonts, flatten transparency, and inspect separations with Acrobat's Output Preview tool
Best for: A working illustrator or designer who has been burned by dull, mismatched, or rejected print files and wants to understand color and file setup well enough to talk to a printer with confidence.
Skip it if: Someone who just wants a fast checklist to export one file today, or an already-experienced print production artist who needs no explanation of gamut, bleed, or CMYK.