Digital Printing Proof

[dgraves]

How are companies supplying proofs to customers for digital printing?

Are most companies sending the customer an actual paper proof of the job? Or are just printing it?

If a customer sends in a pdf file and does not want to see a proof but does want to see a pdf file, what are people doing? Currently, we are using the Fiery for color management (in essence we are just "printing" the pdf file which is then color corrected on the fiery).

Are you printing CMYK or are you converting everything to RGB before going to the Fiery?

Thanks.

 

[Steve_S]

It depends on the client. Generally we are sending a PDF that has gone through the same Preflight profiles that will be used to produce the job. However, we do have some clients that want the hard output, and that is always done on a calibrated machine on the paper it will be produced on.

 

[Fritz]

Our customers either are particular about the color or not so much. For those who are, we do a shading & gradation adjustment and a color calibration before running a hard copy proof off of our Canon 7000. We'll repeat the drill when we print the approved proof later on. When we don't do the adjust, proofs may drift off target a little bit, but then the customer doesn't really care.

VDP is a factor in most of our jobs. Our workflow is done in FusionPro, so the composed output file is what we use if the customer requests a pdf proof. We'll extract a few pages of the file for them to view. But the color on the pdf is not WYSIWYG, so it doesn't say much about color on the final piece.

 

[natty]

If you are doing a hardcopy proof why not put it through all of the usual treatments (pre-flight, convert to CMYK, impose) as you are going to do this anyway, and may as well print it on the correct stock as well...

If you are sending an email proof, for data integrity (flattening, bleeds etc) you may as well do all of the above as well (to make sure nothing changes through the process) but as stated as far as colour is concerned you are wasting your time with PDF soft proofs there is nothing you can do to really make it look like it will when printed, on your customers computer screens...

You should really just have a disclaimer on all of your email proofs saying that there is no guarantee of colour accuracy... You can create a press profile and apply it to the PDF but every computer screen is different and there is no level playing field like there is in an actual hard-copy proof...

 

[MGB_LE]

We are seeing an increasing request for PDF proofs, even when the client provided a PDF. typical for digital printing we provide a hardcopy, production-ready proof With PDF proofs we have unresolved challenges: If we run the PDFs through our RIP software, they become to large to easily email, so how do we make them available to clients? Not everyone is comfortable or knowledgable about FTP. For that reason we don't usually rip the PDF proofs so we run the risk of the file haveing rip issues after proof approval. Suggestions?

 

[pacart]

We send pdf proofs to 100% of our clients, our Nexus rip makes a smaller pdf file for proofing when we rip the original.

As with all pdf files though we send along a disclaimer that basically says these files are for content only and should not be used for color correctness. If a color correct proof is needed please contact our office for a color accurate epson proof.

Then we charge them for it, most people aren't willing to pay for printed proof so we don't make too many.

 

[graficworx]

I think many designers don't realize that what they see on their screen may not be what they actually get. Some people think a PDF proof is good enough to see what they will be getting in the final piece. As pacart said, a PDF proof should only be for content and trim, not color correctness. Even hard copy proof may not always be completely accurate, although they are close.

 

[david]

Affordable High Resolution Online Proof

Affordable High Resolution Online Proof

We have a couple of nice options for you to consider.

First is our I-Zoom plugin. You can use this with either a Harlequin Rip or in conjunction with our TaskForce Rip and workflow. It can export high resolution zoomable proofs that let your clients view REAL Proofs of RIPPED jobs right in their browser with the very finest level of details, and your cost can be as low as just a few hundred dollars to buy the plugin. It can be configured to create either single page zoomable proofs or I-Zoom Page Collections where users can view documents with 1 to hundreds of pages..
Here are some examples:
This is a magazine with lots of pages


Users can also Embed zoomable proofs into their web site - here is an example of an embeded proof:



The second option is our TIFF Pager application which can make online zoomable proofs from the actual one bit TIFF files from any rip:
Here is an example of a zoomable 1 bit TIFF set


More details of TIFF Pager are here
TIFFPager The Everything Tool for all Flavors of TIFF files!

David Lewis

 

[verticaldirect]

We are seeing an increasing request for PDF proofs, even when the client provided a PDF. typical for digital printing we provide a hardcopy, production-ready proof With PDF proofs we have unresolved challenges: If we run the PDFs through our RIP software, they become to large to easily email, so how do we make them available to clients? Not everyone is comfortable or knowledgable about FTP. For that reason we don't usually rip the PDF proofs so we run the risk of the file haveing rip issues after proof approval. Suggestions?

You can use services such as:

Free large file hosting. Send big files the easy way!
www.yousendit.com

...to send large PDF files to your clients for proofing.

 

[Corey]

We also provide pdfs to our clients as proofs. I liked the other options posted by others however.