Add Bleed to a PDF
Your printer is asking for "+3mm bleed and crop marks," but you only have the final PDF provided by the client? Discover how to recreate material on the edges using a mirror effect in seconds.
Your printer is asking for "+3mm bleed and crop marks," but you only have the final PDF provided by the client? Discover how to recreate material on the edges using a mirror effect in seconds.
When a document is printed (flyer, poster, business card...), it is printed on large sheets of paper which are then cut to the final size using a guillotine cutter.
However, the cutter blade is not accurate to the millimeter. If there is no safety margin (the bleed), the slightest inaccuracy will leave a thin white line (the color of the unprinted paper) on the edges of your document. Bleed consists of extending the background elements (images, colors) beyond the final format (usually 3mm or 5mm) to secure the cut.
The theory is simple: just stretch the background image in Illustrator or InDesign. But what do you do when your client sends you a PDF already exported to the exact size, without bleed, and they no longer have the source files?
Enlarging the entire PDF will bring the text too close to the edge (which is dangerous). Opening the PDF in Photoshop to add material will pixelate your vector text.
Our Bleed Tool (available for free online) solves this impossible geometric problem: