Guides · Print

Preparing an album for print: bleed, safe area and colour

A well-designed album can come back badly printed because of three millimetres. This guide explains what a lab asks for, why it asks for it and how to check your files before sending them, so that what comes out of the trimmer is what you saw on screen.

Updated 14 October 2026 · 7 minute read

1. What to ask your lab

Every lab has its own specifications, usually in a spec sheet or on each product's page. Before designing, have these to hand:

• Final page size, and whether files go per spread or per page.
• Bleed, in millimetres or inches, and whether it's the same horizontally and vertically.
• Safe area or safety margin.
• Whether the binding is layflat or sewn, and how much the spine eats.
• Resolution (nearly always 300 PPI) and colour profile (nearly always sRGB).
• File format (JPEG or PDF), quality and how they want files named.

If the spec sheet doesn't say, ask. One email too many beats a reprinted album.

2. Bleed

Bleed is a strip of image printed beyond the edge of the spread and then trimmed off. It exists because the trimmer never cuts exactly on the line: it drifts by a millimetre or two. If a photo ended exactly at the edge, any drift would leave a white sliver.

The usual figure is 3 mm (about ⅛ in) per side, though some labs ask for 5 mm, and some ask for a different value vertically and horizontally. A 60 × 30 cm spread with 3 mm of bleed is therefore sent at 60.6 × 30.6 cm.

Two practical consequences:

• Photos that touch the edge must go past it. A full-bleed photo has to extend to the end of the bleed, not stop at the trim line. That means those millimetres of the photo are lost: don't put anything important right at the edge.
• Interior photos don't change. A photo surrounded by white margin doesn't need bleed; it stays where it is.

What should never carry bleed is the proof you send the couple: on screen, that extra margin looks like a cropping mistake.

3. The safe area

The safe area is the margin inside the trim line where you shouldn't put anything important: text, faces, signatures. Where bleed protects against a white sliver, the safe area protects against the opposite: the cut drifting inwards and taking a letter or someone's chin with it.

Many labs set it at a few millimetres; others don't mention it. Even if nobody asks, always keep text a sensible distance from the edge: a title two millimetres from the trim looks wrong even if it survives the blade.

4. The spine and the gutter

The centre of the spread, where the two pages meet, is the gutter. In layflat bindings, common for wedding albums, the spread opens without curving and hardly anything is lost in the middle. In sewn or glued bindings the paper curves into the spine and a central strip is hidden.

Either way the rule is the same: no faces and no text in the centre of the spread. In sewn bindings, also treat each page as its own safe area, with a margin towards the spine too.

5. The colour profile

Unless your lab says otherwise, send sRGB. It's the space most lab photo printers are calibrated for, and the only one that looks the same on any screen.

• If you edit in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, convert to sRGB on export. An Adobe RGB file that the lab reads as sRGB comes out flat, with skin tones off.
• Embed the profile in the file. A JPEG without a profile forces the lab to guess, and guessing is what produces surprises.
• Don't convert to CMYK unless you're explicitly asked. Photo labs work in RGB; CMYK is for offset printing.

6. File format and naming

The most common is one JPEG per spread, at high quality (90 or more out of 100), with numbered names that make the order obvious: smith-wedding-01.jpg, smith-wedding-02.jpg… With leading zeros, so spread 10 doesn't sort before spread 2. Bundled into a ZIP, which uploads in one go and doesn't lose a file on the way.

Some labs prefer a single PDF. If yours does, ask whether the PDF needs a specific output profile: a PDF without one is more ambiguous on colour than a JPEG with an embedded profile.

7. The check before sending

Before uploading, one last pass with this list:

1. No blank spreads and no empty frames.
2. No photo below 200 effective PPI in its frame.
3. No text, face or important detail in the bleed, the safe area or the gutter.
4. The pixel dimensions of a couple of files match the size plus bleed (the table is in Sizes and resolution).
5. The embedded profile is sRGB.
6. The names follow the album's order and none is missing.
7. The originals are still where they were: if a file was moved or deleted, better to know now.