Bleed

Bleed is the extra image area extending beyond the trim edge of a print job — typically 3mm in Europe and 0.125 inch in the US — so background colour reaches the cut line after trimming. Without bleed, small misalignments at the cutter produce thin white slivers along the edge of the finished piece.

Also called: print bleed · bleed area · 3mm bleed · full bleed · bleed setting Photoshop · bleed in printing

In depth

Print cutters are accurate but not perfect; a stack of finished sheets can shift by up to a millimetre as it is cut. If a background colour or image ends exactly at the trim line and the cutter is half a millimetre short, the finished piece shows a white sliver. Bleed gives the cutter room to err: the image extends past the trim and the surplus is sliced off.

Bleed only applies to elements that are designed to reach the edge — full-bleed photographs, coloured backgrounds, edge-to-edge stripes. Type and other elements that need to stay visible should be pulled inward from the trim by a similar margin (the "safe zone") for the same reason: a slightly mis-cut piece should not lose the last letter of a line of body copy.

In a properly prepared file, bleed is implemented as content extending 3mm past the artboard or page boundary, and the PDF is exported with bleed marks turned on. Preflight at the printer's end checks for adequate bleed and flags pages that lack it. PeakSpitz AIERP includes a bleed check in its automated preflight pipeline.

Common questions

How much bleed do I need?+
Standard is 3mm in Europe and 0.125 inch (about 3.2mm) in the US. Specialty jobs sometimes need more — die-cut packaging often asks for 5mm. Your printer will tell you the exact figure; PeakSpitz AIERP carries a per-printer default that flows into the customer-facing spec sheet.
Why does my printer reject my file for "no bleed"?+
Because the design ends exactly at the trim line. Either extend the background past the page edge by 3mm in your design tool, or ask the printer to add bleed at prepress (some will do this from a wide-margin file, others will not).

Related terms

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