What is a bleed?

Question:

What is a bleed?

Answer:

A bleed is the area of a print or product that gets trimmed off. The bleed area accounts for small movement during the finishing process. To print a "full bleed" image, it is necessary to print a slightly larger area than what is needed and then trim the paper down to the appropriate size.

When placing your images into a template, remember that you will need at least a 1/16" bleed area on all sides for print trimming.

If you are ordering a mounted photo print or metal print, there can be up to 1/8” bleed from each side.

We highly recommend 1/8'' bleed on all sides for album spreads, photo book pages, and press cards.

You must keep all essential elements, such as text, faces, and other important parts, from extending into the bleed zone to ensure they will not be cropped while cutting the final print.

On our card products, the safe zone is represented by the green dotted line; everything within that line is safe from being trimmed.

For example, on the 5x7" cards, the actual size of the designed card is 5.25x7.25", then after it’s printed, our team trims down the card to 5x7", so any design or information outside the trim zone will be trimmed off.

If you are creating a product and are concerned about trimming, please contact us so that we can help review the design to see if there could be any potential trimming. Our production team tries to catch all issues to let Customer Service know, but there are instances where things can be missed.