File Compression for CtP

[kburton]

We are starting to get some rather large files being designed as of late and they are starting to choke on our older CtP system as well filling up our Backup Server. Does anyone have any suggestions to lower the file size while not losing print quality? Is there something that can be done either in the Design stage or on the PDF output?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Martin Mueller]

If your plate setter is controlled by a TIFF-shooter, you can try out various compressions (CCITT G3/G4, LZW, Packbits, Packwords...) to shrink the 1bit TIFF job files. It depends on your RIP and TIFF-shooter capabilities.

 

[kburton]

Unfortunately that is not an option unless we pay to upgrade our RIP.

 

[gordo]

If it's the images in the files then, IMHO, you can resample them to a dpi that's @100% reproduction 1.5 x the lpi of your halftone screen and save them using jpeg compression that's medium high without seeing a difference in the print. As always, test first.

 

[Dario]

If you are talking about design files, I use to '7zx' them using ultra compression for storage purpose.
If you are talking about pdf for printing, I use to downsample them a lot if large images are used, and even to rasterize some areas if too much vectors are involved.
In older times, when printing separations directly to RIP, I used to save images in dcs-jpg format to lighten the Rip - without losing quality nor clients.

 

[Danny Whitehead]

The better (and eventually, the only) option will be increasing your storage capacity, rather than messing about throwing away data or deteriorating quality to save a few GB.