A Quick Note About AI-Generated Artwork for Plastic Card Printing

More and more customers are sending us designs created with AI tools — and honestly, a lot of them look fantastic. The problem is that AI image generators have no idea your design is going on a plastic card, so the files almost always arrive in the wrong format for print. Here's why, and what we do about it.

Why AI Artwork Usually Isn't Print-Ready

AI design tools are built for screens, not printing presses. That means the files they produce typically have three issues:


Wrong size and shape — AI tools generate square or arbitrary-sized images, not the precise dimensions of a credit-card-sized plastic card. We have to resize and reshape the design to fit, which can shift or crop important elements if we're not careful.


No bleed — Printed cards need extra artwork around the edges (called "bleed") that gets trimmed off during cutting. This guarantees there's no thin white line round the edge if the cut is a fraction of a millimetre out. AI-generated images are flat, finished pictures with nothing extra to give — there's no bleed to extend, so we have to create it artificially.


Wrong colour format (RGB instead of CMYK) — Screens display colour using RGB (red, green, blue light). Printing presses use CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black ink). AI tools only ever output RGB. Converting to CMYK can shift colours noticeably — particularly with bright greens, vivid blues, and rich purples, which often look duller or different once converted.


The Trickiest Bit: Dark and Black Backgrounds
If your AI artwork has a black or very dark background, or a moody photo where the subject blends into shadow, that's the hardest type of file to convert. Pure black on screen (RGB 0,0,0) doesn't translate directly to pure black in CMYK printing of C0 M0 Y0 K100 — getting a rich, even black across a large background area takes careful adjustment, or you can end up with patchy, washed-out, or slightly brown-looking "black" once printed. Where a dark subject blends into a dark background, that blend can shift unevenly during conversion, sometimes losing definition that was visible on screen.

We can usually fix this, but it takes more time than a standard file, and on rare occasions a small amount of contrast or detail is lost in the process.

What We Do With Your Artwork

When your file comes in, we:
Resize and reshape it to the exact card dimensions and bleed requirements

Convert the colour profile from RGB to CMYK

Check and correct the resulting colours, especially in dark or black areas

Send you a proof showing exactly what will be printed, so there are no surprises

How You Can Help Us Help You

Send us the file as early as possible — colour correction on tricky artwork takes longer than a standard print-ready file.

Tell us if you're open to small adjustments — sometimes a slightly different background tone prints far more reliably than pure black

Always check your proof carefully — colours on your screen (RGB) will never look 100% identical to the printed card (CMYK); this is a limitation of print, not an error on our part

If in doubt, ask us first — we're happy to look at your AI-generated design before you finalise it and flag anything likely to cause printing issues

We're not precious about how a design gets made — AI, Photoshop, by hand, doesn't matter to us. We just want to make sure what ends up in your hand looks as close as possible to what you had in your head.