Prepress

I was inspired by The Blackcountry Man who did a series of blips showing the process of making bricks in his workplace. Also Scintilla asked what a prepress professional does on one of my recent blips. My answer sparked an interesting debate between him and Northernwhich went from graphic designers to jell-O shots. Amusing.

So this is Prepress which is the front end of a printshop if you discount sales administration and management (not hard!). Here we receive files, mostly from graphic designers and run them through a series of checks to see if there are any problems which will cause an issue at the print stage. What issues? Missing fonts, four colour blacks, bleed, RGB images, overprinting, missing links (images), spot colours and my favourite: the number of pages. The list goes on but those are probably the main ones. When we have finished checking the files we send them to a RIP to make the files into a format the imagesetter and inkjets can understand.

We also lay the page numbers out in an imposition file which is a layout of the individual pages on a big sheet of paper. The imposition file and the job files are then married up in the RIP then a high and low resolution proof is output for the client to check and sign off. The low resolution proofs and folded up into dummy book to make sure the pages run in numerical order.

Bored yet?

Finally when the job is signed off by the client we make plates for the printing press. The plates are made of aluminium. I will go into more detail about how the image on the plate gets transferred onto the paper tomorrow.

Prepress gets a bit underrated I think. It is our job to find and fix mistakes. Whenever there is an issue with a job the fingers always point back to prepress first. I like my chosen career. It is very precise and I get to tool around with lots of software packages and be involved with colour management to ensure a consistent product. Believe it or not, it is quite an exact science when it is running right, which is most of the time.

In the image from left to right: middle left, proofs on the cutting table. Above that in front of the door is the image setter and the plate processor is behind the pole. Next is me (with my #1 haircut) checking and measuring a plate which has been exposed. Next to me is the plate bender, and on the far right are all out Macs and PC's which are used for churning out files.

Sorry about the mess!

Tomorrow: The printers.