Businesses spend a lot of time and energy planning their advertising campaigns. These efforts to promote the product are usually carefully organized and detailed in nature so that they hold appeal for specific demographic groups that are the focus of the campaign. In order for a business to increase its appeal and expand its customer pool, it has to generate continued interest from more and more people. This is a crucial matter for continued success and growth that most corporations take very seriously. Such endeavors used to entail print media almost exclusively, but in recent years, the venues in which businesses can advertise their products and services has increased dramatically. Modern advertising efforts can focus on print ads, television commercials, radio ads, social media marketing, and online advertising. With these increased avenues for exposure, many businesses are hard pressed to keep advertisements fresh and adaptable so some form of the content can be used on any venue.
With this expansion of areas where advertising can take place, it is common for people to mistakenly think that the services of a printing company are out-of-place. This assumption could be little farther from the truth. Though printing companies have had to adapt the types of services they offer to better fit the demands of consumers and businesses better, they are a necessary part of the advertising endeavor. Hiring the services of a printing company did in deed once revolve around ordering a banner, sign, or billboard product that would later be hung in more populated areas. The printing company had the expertise needed to take an analog picture from a camera and blow it up to enormous proportions to be printed on banner and sign surfaces. These are still necessary services used by businesses, but they are no longer the only areas of expertise employed. A modern printing company has as much skill with these analog pictures as they do with digital images.
Often, it is necessary to take analog images and convert them to digital ones that can be printed for signs as well as used online or as part of a television commercial. Using screen shots from a particular shoot or incorporating a print ad theme into an interactive online ad is part of the skill which a modern printing company can offer. Though they do not plan the advertising campaign at all, they are able to take different pieces and components of the various types of film, media, and digital data and incorporate all of these different techniques together so that can be used more effectively to reach larger and larger demographic pools of potential customers. One of the most difficult challenges which a printing company faces when working with these means is the continuous tone and pixel differences between analog and digital images.
With a regular film camera, the images created have thousands of hues and tonal values that are present in a continuous wave across the picture. This is true whether it is color or a black and white image. The transitions between portions of the picture are relatively seamless. In contrast, a digital image is made of pixels, or square blocks of color. This forms a grid rather than a continuous flow in the image. If a digital picture is magnified without adjustment, the pixels that form the picture become easily seen and can be distracting and unprofessional in appearance. For this reason, printing companies will often use the highest resolution possible which means there are more dots of color recorded in each inch of the picture. The higher resolution a digital image has, the more it resembles the continuous flow of analog pictures.