Recent content by John Reveley

I am always surprised how even the Pantone books vary in the colour they show for each swatch! The first thing I would ask the client is how old is the swatch they are looking at and is the client viewing the colour in controlled lighting conditions! In fact has the printer done the same!

Would we agree that there are companies out there would are doing well in this climate? Then actually the management should be the first to go, the ones that keep on year after year telling us the same old story of job cuts and efficiency drives while the company, sides down the greasy pole...

If you have found a way that gives you consistently good results... great! keep using it, but if you find yourself constantly tweaking then you are kidding yourself!

Oh how true that is Mark!

Client: Hang on.. you are not turning out the same quality now, we are having to reject much more of your work, and no you cannot re-negotiate the charges we are happy with our new prices. (for now)

Printer: Oh great that means we don't need skilled workers any more, we can employ school leavers! Clients: But you get the jobs out much quicker now, you obviously are charging us too much, we need to re-negotiate our costs, you are far too expensive!

Eh! what have you done to my image, it was great when I took it! Yes, but that’s before you reduced the resolution and Jpeg’d it, then placed into your artwork software and exported it to pdf with more Jpeg compression then compressed it further, making a 200K file that you could email to us!

I am a professional Photoshop retoucher, and have been using the product for over 20 years. I shared the horror of renting software, but I agree that actually it is part of the cost of running a business. You have to appreciate the enormous power that these applications give us. I remember the...

If the profile is Opencolor then this is a new technology from GMG, it will not be able to be read and converted by any other product. Your best bet would be to contact GMG who will be able to advise you fully on what you need to do, they will also be able to confirm if the chart is indeed...

Kodak, like many companies that sell us things, either knowingly or perhaps arrogantly, make claims, which to the folk working at the coal face, know are either impossible or just ignorantly optimistic. The company I work for, were solely chosen to beta test the NX plates in the UK a few years...

I work in the repro industry and most of my experience is with flexo these days. The quality varies greatly between printers from dreadful to close to gravure quality. My aim to the reach the latter, but both repro technicians and printers have their role to play. It is often difficult to...

Litho line thickness Litho line thickness I started my career in a litho printer, on the design/repro site, and my experience there taught me that offset litho is a brilliant process. To be honest our presses only went up to SRA2. But a good operator Litho can hold an incredible amount of...

Introduction Introduction Hi all, My name is John Reveley, I started out my career in graphic design but soon ended up in pre-press, where I have been for 30+ years. I am presently working for a company called Miller Graphics, formerly Corniche fine Arts, in Yorkshire, England and have worked...