Without having the necessary funds available to purchase up-to-date versions of the best graphics software, I am still ambling along with Photoshop CS, Paint Shop Pro 9 and QuarkXpress Passport 6.1.I have always found PSP 9 far more intuitive than Photoshop and so have never had any hesitation in using it to create logos and manipulate raster images. However, I have recently been asked to produce a number of items for print and, as PSP 9 doesn't allow you to design in CMYK, I have had to switch my allegiance to Photoshop. And it's not going well. Why they (Adobe) have to make the simplest of tasks difficult is beyond me - with PSP, vectors are the easiest thing in the world to create and alter - and even completing the most basic tasks is beginning to irritate.
The work I have been asked to do involves the production of various stationery items, in both Photoshop and Quark format.I have been attempting to create the files in Paint Shop Pro (as manipulating vectors is a piece of cake), convert them to CMYK in Photoshop and then import the final ESP or TIF file into Quark. However, when I do so the image is incredibly small and almost unrecogniseable from the original due to heavy pixelation. I have also attempted importing files created in Photoshop itself, without success.
Are there specific settings I need when creating the EPS and TIF files in the first place, or am I doing something completely wrong from the start? One of the images I tried to import measured 60mm x 57.4mm @ 300dpi (Quark project measured 95.4mm x 57.4mm), and was nothing more complicated than a purple background with darker purple circles on top. The base purple was created using exactly the same CMYK values as in Quark, yet the colours weren't even close to matching and the pixelation was ridiculous.
Any help in resolving this problem would be very much appreciated.