Preparing Your Album Art for Print

Jason, a project manager at Hellbender Vinyl, has seen enough botched artwork submissions to know where things go wrong. His tutorial walks through the technical requirements that separate a smooth pressing from a frustrating back-and-forth with the plant. If you'd rather watch him explain it, check the video out here.

Hellbender's project managers work primarily in Adobe - Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. 

- Photoshop is raster-based, working with pixels. Photographs live here. Enlarge them too much and they pixelate.

- Illustrator uses vectors—points and paths that scale infinitely without degradation. Logos, type, clean graphics.

- InDesign handles page layout. If you're designing a lyric sheet or anything text-heavy, this keeps elements aligned and organized.

Templates contain three lines that define critical boundaries:

Inner dotted line (Type Safety): All essential elements—text, logos, important imagery—stay inside this line. Anything outside risks getting trimmed.

Solid line (Cut Line): Where the blade actually cuts. There's tolerance on either side, which is why the type safety line exists.

Outer line (Bleed): Usually red. Your artwork extends to this edge. If the cut runs slightly long or short, the bleed prevents un-inked margins from appearing.

Screens display in RGB (red, green, blue). Printing uses CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). Designing in RGB and converting later produces color shifts—sometimes subtle, sometimes not.

Work in CMYK from the beginning.

Print files require 300 dpi minimum. Lower resolution produces soft, muddy images. Resolution can't be added retroactively—if you start at 150 dpi and scale up, you're still working with insufficient data.

- TIFF for photographs

- JPEG works if high-resolution, though compression sacrifices some information

- PNG doesn't belong here—it's RGB-based and unsuited to print production

Keep the template on its own layer and lock it. Build artwork on separate layers above. This organizational choice makes revisions significantly easier.

Save a layered version. Keep your Photoshop or Illustrator file with layers intact. This allows the pressing plant to make adjustments without starting over.

Outline all text.

- Illustrator: Select text → Type menu → Create Outlines

- Photoshop: Right-click → Convert to Shape

Export a final PDF.

- Use "High Quality Print" preset

- Disable the template layer before exporting

Following these guidelines won't guarantee perfection, but it eliminates the most common technical failures. Most pressing delays trace back to artwork that wasn't properly prepared in the first place. Check out Jason's YouTube video for more details on submitting your art.