I am designing a business card in Illustrator where I have taken my full color vector logo, enlarged it and set the blend mode to Overlay & the opacity to 55% in order to display it is a faded out background image with a monochromatic palette (all tints and shades of the background color). It looks a little like this:
This looks great (with respect to the amount of contrast between the image and the actual background color)on my monitor and pretty good on my cheap-o desktop inkjet printer, but I realize that does't guarantee how it will be reproduced on the digital press they'll be printed on.
The printers don't give hard copy proofs, but the pre-press person I deal with told me to take it into photoshop, use blend modes and transparency to "get it the way it should look" and convert to a high-resolution bitmap at 100% opacity without any blend modes.
I can do this no problem (and can think of a way or 2 to do it in Illustrator), but it doesn't solve my issue of not knowing whether or not the image will print with the contrast close to what I see on my screen. When I asked about this, I was told that "it should be good with about 10-15%". This is where I get a bit lost.
Is there some standard way (with Photoshop or all in Illustrator) to create the type of image I'm describing for print? or is there a world in which one can measure and adjust the range of contrast (preferably by %) in the pixels making up an image in Photoshop?
