Comments on: Tips on Pre-flight before sending to the printers

By: website design perth

website design perth — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:34:13 +0000

Loved your blog

By: Green Hat

Green Hat — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 09:05:05 +0000

Fantastic article! Pre-flight is a lost art. The amount of times our printers get RGB or low res images is not funny! There are so many things to consider, and with print, the finished article exactly that, finished. No updating or tweaking like web. Many thanks for this article.

By: Stan @ Sonic Print

Stan @ Sonic Print — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:13:28 +0000

This subject is NEAR and DEAR to my heart. As a printing company, the quality of files that we receive has degraded greatly in the last 10 years. We’ve found that a lot of people sacrifice quality design for budget and hire their brother cousin has photoshop to design. Just because I buy a microscope doesn’t make me a scientist– but I digress.

If I may add a few things —

1) Native files are great(indesign, quark, .ai) but there is always elements missing and not included like you said in the post. Someone always forgets an image, or a font and there is a delay. Truthfully, I think most printers would rather PDFs with fonts outlined. The wild west days of PDFs have settled down for the most part most PDFs will output through prepress fine.

2) If you’re printing CMYK process, it’s a given not to design in RGB, but it’s also important to make sure you’re not using a PMS palette. This can give you a surprise because if the pre-press tech doesn’t catch it, the rip will completely disregard the PMS colors when outputting your prints for only process printing. This happens a lot with small PMS logos dropped in to a process job. They will disappear from final output unless flattened before output.

4) Flatten transparencies and turn off overprint. These are two things that will look fine on the screen and even when printed on your desk printer but it will wreck things when going through a rip. Some rips can pick this stuff up but many will disregard this information and you’ll end up with a surprise after output.

When getting a PDF proof sometimes prepress departments will flatten the image for proofing but not when sending it to the rip to save your fonts from being raster. Transparencies and Overprint will get you if you don’t want it!

I have a much more comprehensive list, but I’m not sure if you want me to post it on your blog. I would be glad to post the link if you’d like so I can help designers.

Last part of my rambling.. :)
Many of these problems will be caught by a good prepress tech – however.. when they have 50 files to preflight, sometimes these issues will slip through the cracks and cause a headache for everyone!

Stan –
SonicPrint.com Printing in Tampa

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Wed, 31 Mar 2010 05:11:46 +0000

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By: Florinda Glodo

Florinda Glodo — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:11:16 +0000

Enjoy your blog...found it via bing. Subscribed! Thanks, Free Printing Samples

By: Annika

Annika — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:16:51 +0000

real good tips..this page is on my favourite pages’ list now :)

By: Luke Harmes

Luke Harmes — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:09:31 +0000

"It is much easier to work on files in an RGB" but when you convert it to CMYK your colour will slightly differ as the RGB colour gamma is larger than CMYK, So just make sure your happy with the CMYK output before sending off .-= Luke Harmes´s last blog ..My artwork contains gradients =-.

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By: kaiser

kaiser — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:19:30 +0000

some things i´d suggest to add/edit:

* converting into curves possible, but then the printer can´t edit missspellings themselfs and for e.g. folders with a lot of txt explode in size and make printers angree if they got slow machines

* NEVER PRINT A PDF, save! it to get the right colors (plain cyan stays plain cyan and doesn´t get converted to xy% of C M Y and K)

* Provide your main/reference colors as ai-palletes (spelled correctly?)

nice blog and thanks for the post.

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