It was an important factor, especially when working on multi-paginated documents. The genius part about this process is that the EPS' high-resolution image data was only called upon when sending the artwork to a Postscript-enabled printer. It greatly helped to reduce the limited processing power and RAM required to handle the document and kept productivity up. Unlike TIFF, the high-resolution EPS file had a built-in feature that offered a low-resolution 8-bit colour positional image that could be imported and positioned within Quark XPress documents. Investing in a PostScript printer brought benefits such as accurate colour reproduction and greater productivity with larger multi-paginated files.
Unfortunately, this was not only a headache for many, it was time-consuming too. One example was placing separate low-resolution positional TIFF files supplying the high-resolution images to the printers to be swapped out at prepress. Alternatively, designers could employ a workaround solution. As a result, designers were forced to break down larger Quark XPress documents to just a few pages, which became more manageable. Using high-resolution TIFF files within Quark XPress using computers with limited processing power and a small amount of RAM often bought it to a crawl. As such, most designers opted to buy the cheaper linear printers and work with high-resolution TIFF images however, the trade-off with productivity was huge. While EPS and TIFF worked with PostScript printers, the optional Adobe PostScript Level II software cost a small fortune compared to linear printers, which were far more affordable. When it came to photo imaging in the '90s, there were only two main formats: EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) and TIFF (Tagged Information File Format). Do you need to change formats because of evolving hardware, software and processes? Still, if the 'if it ain't broke, why fix it' approach has always been a stable way of working, sometimes you need to periodically check if other image file formats offer a better way of working while meeting standards for commercial printing. With near-on three decades in the industry naturally comes experience.
Here, Dean Cook offers up some food for thought to help keep productivity up without bloating the size of your InDesign file. Some say JPEG others prefer PSD, many still use TIFF or even EPS.
With four main image formats (JPEG, PSD, TIFF and EPS), choosing which image format to use is always a popular talking point with designers.
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