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The Fall conference in St. Louis, MO in October?

That is great. Hope they actually give up the info instead of just trying to sell a new spectrophotometer. Just signed up now. Thanks.

Hey, everyone. So it took a while to figure out why my spectrophotometer wasn't giving me accurate dot area readings for process colors. It resulted in having dot gain curves that were pulling the colors way too far back and causing light prints. But I got through that challenge and had it...

We make CTP flexo plates that are lasered off carbon masks. We've seen something like this happen when the laser starts to lose power. It happened when the filter stopped working and the dust particles were starting to cover the laser. It happened when the laser just started wearing out. And it...

As far as the cylinders go, we've ruled those out since sometimes the issue goes away and it returns. And it does so on jobs that use the same exact cylinders. Literally the same cylinders. Not just the same size. So if it were the cylinders, the plates would always be crooked on them, right?

We have a manual mounter with two cameras to aide with the alignment. The problem that strikes me with the mounting is that it's just the one bearer bar. If the plates were mounted crooked, wouldn't both bearer bars end up crooked? Also, the issue shows up when the plates are mounted by eye as well.

All good suggestions. But they are items that we've checked and eliminated as a cause. The 1-BIT TIFFs are indeed verified as generated perfectly straight.

Unfortunately the care of the cylinders is outside my department. But I can certainly suggest this to at least eliminate that as a possibility. But one question... how do you check this? I ask because since I never handle the cylinders, I don't know how to do it. And since I'm pretty sure no one...

Okay, I actually thought that was kinda funny.

Are these plates made by layering off a carbon mask?

I am wondering if anyone else has encountered this problem. We use a CTP laser to ablate off a black mask. Our exposure unit is a UV light bank. We use a water washout system. And the exposure unit has two heating racks. We keep our laser drum clean from residue and we make sure not to tape...

I haven't read through all of your replies here. So forgive me if someone has already covered this answer. But I think that you can get away without using a plate curve so long as you are able to verify that the plates are always being produced consistently. For example, if you set up a 50%...

We use Xante's Symphony Flexo RIP and I am wondering if anyone out there has figured out a way to archive jobs from it? Let's say that we do a job and name it Job_12345. Then 3 years later we need to make an update to this job, but it needs to be identical to what we did last time. It would be...

In the past we've used our plate quality to judge exposure times with UV bulbs. If the floor is consistently too low, we need to use a longer back exposure. When fine dots don't form correctly, we need to use a longer main exposure. But recently we've purchased a UV light meter to gauge the...

At our company Prepress creates the blank template with die lines, safe areas, bleed, and dimensions. The client's designer does the layout. Prepress just checks to make sure that whatever the designer did will actually print correctly on press.

Thanks. What about anilox variables?

That's most likely what we will need to do. Just roll with it. And I'm running around talking with various department heads to try and figure out which variables we can cut out for now. But we are still going to need to manage the multiple curves, however many there are. Do you have any...

If I am understanding the question correctly I think this may be an option. We use Esko plug-ins to run Preflighting of files in Illustrator. This gives us our minimum percentage bumps, our warnings to look at, any missing or embedded images to look into, etc... Then we use Esko's PowerTrapper...

So if you have one press, one substrate, one ink, one plate material, and two anilox rolls you have two compensation curves to make. If you then add another substrate you have four curves to make. If you then add another ink type, you now have eight curves to make. If you add another press, you...

Does anyone know where to find good optimization targets? Maybe they are commonly called something else, but that's all I know them as. They are one color control tests used to evaluate some aspect of the press's behavior under certain printing conditions. I'm attaching the one that I already...