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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...

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...

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...

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...

We use Xante Symphony Flexo RIP 7.0. It has the ability to use ICC profiles, dot gain curves, and hybrid screening. It's basically the only thing we are using for color management. The people who were in charge before I was hired did not do a great job of creating a viable color management...

Okay, so I'm about 95% of the way there on my own. I think I'm just missing one aspect to color management... - Following FIRST specs, we eventually get to the press characterization trials (the stage where you produce the crazy multi-colored test chart). - We print one of these color test...

We currently make water wash flexo plates following an established workflow of exposure and washout times. I am wondering how much of this workflow is accurate, and how much of it is someone's guess that sounded good. The process times we use are as follows... - 2 minutes 15 seconds for back...

Currently our Prepress department is Mac based. But besides our three computers, every other computer in the entire company is a PC. This means that our Macs don't have access to certain servers, can't use the MIS system, can't connect to our RIP, and can't use certain files that are common to...

Right now we have three types of digital files for any given job: Proofs, plate files, and 1-bit TIFFs. Everything starts with the plate file. This 1-up image is checked and adjusted for our needs on press. Trap, bleed, minimum color percentages, stroke thickness, holding lines, etc... It all...

I'm running into an issue where our logged plate remakes is becoming too excessive for upper management. The problem is that no one is sure what is an acceptable tolerance to use as a baseline. Depending on whose opinion I am getting at the time the acceptable level seems to change. Someone says...

Okay, so I've come to terms with the fact that my company will just always use a bunch of variables for every job. Each new job brings with it a new combination of press, substrate, ink density, anilox cell count, anilox BCM, plate line screen resolution, screen angles, dot gain, dot gain...

Currently our company uses a RIP called Symphony Flexo made by Xante. We like it because all we need to do is send it a 1-up image and then tell it to step and repeat it however many across and however many around. It does the stepping and repeating, distortion, bearer bars, and color blocks on...

I run a prepress department and have been getting a lot of backlash for inaccurate plates lately. It seems to me that there is a disconnect between three upper managers and myself as to what is the correct way to create accurate plates for press. The three upper managers come from 35 years of...

I manage the prepress department for a company that I've been working at for four months. This means that I've inherited the company workflows that they have already put in place. As a company culture there is a strong emphasis on being able to track all the details of any given job. However...

We're running into an issue with bearer bar registration recently. The issue reared up at the same time the laser etcher was acting up. Okay, so we got the laser serviced. The issue remained. We looked into how we are applying the plates to the vacuum drum, making sure not to lay the plate over...