Automating UCR...

[Hopkins Printing]

***If posting the same question in more than one forum on PrintPlanet is against the rules, my apologies***

I'd like to find a way using either our ApogeeX 3.5 system or Pitstop Pro (or combination of both?) to detect and fix any images within a PDF when the total ink coverage of the images exceed a specific threshold.

Via PDF profile, Pitstop offers a way to check total ink coverage but no apparent way to fix it if it exceeds the specified threshold. I don't know of anything in ApogeeX that can do it either.

I sent a feature request to Enfocus/Artwork Systems asking them to add functionality that will do this but as far as I know, version 7.5 of Pitstop Pro still cannot do this.

Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers, and thanks!
Jon Morgan
Hopkins Printing

[mattbeals]

You cannot programmatically fix ink densities like that in PitStop in any "intelligent" way.

What you could do is to preflight it and if the TAC of the document exceeds your threshold then you fail the job. You could then run an action list that would select all images that are cmyk and then convert them to CMYK. Yes, CMYK to CMYK is what I meant. Unfortunately you can't be too particular with which images you'd like to "fix". That would do it. But if you're going to do that you should use a device link profile. Which of course Acrobat and PitStop cannot use. Only callas pdfColorConvert can do that. You could look to some "higher end" tool like Alwan CMYK Hub or a module for Apogee. But on the desktop Callas pdfColorConvert is the only one that can use device link profiles that I am aware of.

[Louis Dery]

Jon,

we’ve created PerfX Color Server PDF exactly for such needs.

It will "convert" every image element (raster) from a source profile to a destination profile automatically.
In order to reduce ink coverage, you can use the same CMYK ICC profile for source and destination, but creating the output profile with the desired INK Coverage.
It will alaso convert to CMYK, any RGB images as well.

http://www.tglc.com/english/PerfX/ColorServer.html

Hope this help!

Louis Dery
TGLC inc.