Do we really need preflight software?

printfreq

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The company that I work for is considered a "commodity" style printer. For the last 8 years it has brokered out all of its offset work. Two of the last 8 years we've been running a Xerox 700 into the ground. Almost 1,750,000 clicks and going strong!

The company's base of customers primarily need fast turnaround printing. They are not super discriminate when it comes to color. No hardcopy proofing. No color correction. No press checks. As long as the files are 300 dpi, CMYK color mode, and have adequate bleed/cut margin, they get printed. We currently check files for these requirements in Photoshop CS4. They are flattened, multi-upped by using actions we've created, and then sent to a Creo RIP or to an outside company.

Our shop will be receiving a used Ryobi 3404 DI in about a month. It comes with a Harlequin Scriptworks RIP that can handle PostScript or PDF ver. 1.3. Based on what I typed above about the style of shop we are, would any of you suggest the need for Pitstop? The only reason why I see we might need it is to adjust ink densities.

We plan to hit the ground running so any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
 
You will definitely need better software, Pitstop and more (color conversion, trapping, imposition tools):
1. Resolution of your imaging will increase, with it -visibility of errors: for instance barcode - if you rasterise it in Photoshop and send to DI RIP, bars will apear screened - you risk them to be unreadable
2. Offset is different procedure than xerography. You are dealing with wet inks, hitting dry paper, which will expand - consideration on overprints and trapping
3. Changing ink from process to spot is relatively easy, and will be demanded in future. You need to handle colors as well.
This are only couple of issues, which cannot be simply dealt with Photoshop, IMHO.

Janez
 
My company operates entirely via PDF workflow. We use the built in preflight component of Acrobat. We do not use other preflighting software. PDF's are produced out of Indesign and Quark.
 
Great info. Thanks for the tips. Am I correct to think that Pitstop is not going to be able to edit an already flattened file that has been converted to pdf. Say, a jpeg to pdf? There is such a sea of information about the program that I'm having trouble finding that little tidbit. A good amount of our customer's files are sent to us already flattened and most the time in a state of disrepair.
 
Great info. Thanks for the tips. Am I correct to think that Pitstop is not going to be able to edit an already flattened file that has been converted to pdf. Say, a jpeg to pdf? There is such a sea of information about the program that I'm having trouble finding that little tidbit. A good amount of our customer's files are sent to us already flattened and most the time in a state of disrepair.

First we need to figure out what you mean by a "flattened file". Do you mean the transparency has been flattened? Are you referring to a raster image saved as a PDF?

If the transparency is flattened then not all hope is lost. Often there is still some vector objects around to edit. It all depends though, they may not be what you need to edit. If you're talking about a raster image saved as PDF then there is only a few things that you can do to a PDF with PitStop. You might be able to do some of your edits with callas pdfToolbox depending on what it is that needs to be done. Otherwise it's PhotoShop...

Adjusting ink densities with PitStop is not necessarily an easy thing to do. I'd need a lot more information about what you're thinking. In some respects callas pdfToolbox may be a better fit for your color needs. It's hard to get by in a PDF based workflow without PitStop or callas for preflighting and fixing PDF's. Can you do it? Yes. Is it easy? No. It's more cost effective to have one of those tools to save time on labor spending dinking around.

For you as a "commodity printer" (printing is a commodity any more) it is especially important? Why? Because you need to control your costs. Which means you have to control your processes. Which means you need to control everything about your workflow. Variances cost you extra money. You need as predictable and reliable file as you can get. If you don't preflight then you cannot quality check your raw materials (PDF's) to ensure a stable production process. You absolutely have to preflight to normalize the files in the most efficient and reliable way you can.
 
Thanks Matt.

No matter what tools a printer gives a customer to help them create a high quality file, they often fail to use them. We have an extensive library of templates and pages of file setup information on our site that often never gets used. Instead we often get garbage jpegs with low resolution photos. It's either because people don't want to take the time to read instructions or they are just incapable. I think the economy has created a lot of do-it-yourselfers that have bought a $99 version of Photoshop elements but failed to spend $20 on a book to go with! I can't complain much though. Our customers are generally easy going and business is business but I digress...

For the customers that do care about what they are receiving, they often at least give us a pdf. Most the time they are generated from Indesign or Illustrator. 9 times out of 10 they don't have the bleed box setup properly and we have to make edits. Most the time it is quickly fixed in Photoshop. This will need to change.

We have Pitstop Edit for our Creo but it's editing tools are a little cumbersome to use. Maybe it is because it's a lower grade of their product or maybe it is a learning curve we haven't gotten over. It is difficult to tell at this point considering the hodge podge of files we are expected to print in a very short amount of time. I think i'm going to look into Callas pdfToolbox to compare to Pitstop Pro. Either way, I'll be picking something up in the next month.
 
It's great that you'll pick one up, you've got to have something. But it's not enough to have it and to use it. I'll toot my own horn here, but you need to get training to go with it. It's one thing to have it, it's an entirely different thing to be able to use it efficiently and effectively. You also need to know what the practical limits are. Often with PitStop there are more things that you can do with it than you should.
 
It's great that you'll pick one up, you've got to have something. But it's not enough to have it and to use it. I'll toot my own horn here, but you need to get training to go with it. It's one thing to have it, it's an entirely different thing to be able to use it efficiently and effectively. You also need to know what the practical limits are. Often with PitStop there are more things that you can do with it than you should.

We are young and resourceful around here but you are right. What we can't learn from video tutorials, trial and error through actual printing, and message boards will indeed have to be acquired through having someone physically on site to give us the scoop. Luckily this press is being acquired for so cheap and the profit margin will be so high in comparison to outsourcing that we can afford to learn as we go. All we have to do is hit the green button on the press though right?! ;)
 
Preflight before PDF with FlightCheck

Preflight before PDF with FlightCheck

Checking only at the PDF stage is akin to only checking the automobile, after it rolls off the assembly line. Mr. Ford would not buy that. All elements must go through rigid quality assurance checks before and during assembly and of course once the final product is almost ready for delivery.

My advice. You need to check (or make sure it is being checked) the native Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, QuarkXPress, Photoshop, etc files before you make a print PDF. One way or another.

This preflight diagram says it all; well, at least a lot-
Print Quality - the Quality triangle for Designers, Layout Artists, Prepress Operators and Publishers alike

Friendly Regards,
David Dilling
Markzware
For full disclosure - We make FlightCheck
 
Just an opinion

Just an opinion

Hi all

This is my opinion, but I do think Flightchecking is just a gimmick. With good and experienced operators this should not be a neccesary.
Ive been a PrePress Manager for 15 years and you cant beat a good op to solve the problems.

Just a thought

Steve
 
"FlightChecking" or "preflighting"? Your operators already preflight whether they use FlightCheck, PitStop, pdfToolbox or any other tool or by visually inspecting the document. I bet that they use separation preview to check for breaks and rich blacks. The look at the links to see if an image is over res'ed or too low. They probably spend a minute or two, maybe more, loading fonts or finding missing fonts. Probably a few other things too. And I suspect that they only inspect the job when they get it to open it. How long does the job sit once dropped off in prepress before someone cracks it open to inspect it?

So why not make it easier (also known as more efficient) by using technology to aid in the process? No one is delusional to think software preflights will replace manual checking. It only makes it more efficient. But hey, it's your money (figuratively or literally)...
 
Devil's Advocate

Devil's Advocate

I'd like to chirp in and ask a bit more about what preflighting really brings to the table. I am certainly not an expert in this category - but this also likely puts me into the majority.

I have recently worked on a couple of projects involving preflighting both in a standard production situation - and passing prefighting info back to the clients. To me it seems that preflighting is so complex and hard to understand that there is no real benefit to it.

I guess there could be a case for programming intelligence into an organization - but to me it seems that preflight software does not lend itself to being usable by "average" people.

My best case in point is the guys trying to do some real basic preflighting of customer files uploaded through their website. They were looking for the "Pass or Fail" indicator and it just doesn't exist - even in the simplest of cases the resulting PDF or XML "Report" must be scanned by intelligent means to find the simple "Yes" it is good or "No" its bad.

I say Preflighting IS ROCKET SCIENCE - what do you say?

David Lewis
 
Preflight is nothing more than a quality control process. Are we really arrogant enough to believe that we do not need to quality control check the raw materials (art) coming into our manufacturing plants?

As a manufacturer you need to control the quality of the raw materials (art in this case) that you bring into your plant. Imagine an ink manufacturer just bringing in pigment and oil (and whatever else they require) and making a thousand pounds of process cyan ink. Probably wouldn't be a very consistent product. So they take samples of the pigment, the oil and the other components to ensure that they meet a minimum defined specification. It doesn't matter what the specification is, just that it is met. Now they have a bit of process control which allows them to more consistently produce a product of some defined level of quality.

For our industry (and related) there are two basic preflight types; technical and mechanical. A technical preflight software can make more efficient. The mechanical preflight a person really needs to evaluate the art to determine its suitability. A human can determine for their press(es) that a ghosting bar is needed, or they need to run this a certain direction, etc. A program can look and see if the colors used meet the specification, spot vs. CMYK possibly. If the image is too low resolution, rich blacks are used when they shouldn't or aren't when they should. A whole host of conditions can be checked by software.

Preflight isn't really meant for the "average person". They do not know the manufacturing specifications and cannot be reasonably expected to. We know the limits of our equipment and we are expected to produce a quality (what ever criteria is used) product. So it is our responsibility to check the quality of the incoming raw materials. If there's a problem we need to alert our supplier (the customer) and somehow or another resolve the issue. This is where we can be pro-active and maybe even generate a little money. We know the geek speak and the customer doesn't. We can use a technical preflight tool like callas pdfToolbox Server, PitStop Server or FlightCheck to generate a report that can be understood by us. We can similarly use an application to translate a technical issue into something more human friendly.

Apago had the best idea, a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And they did this back in 1999 I think it was with their PDF/X Checkup. If it met PDF/X-1a requirements then you got a thumbs up. If you didn't then you got a thumbs down. It said you have color spaces not allowed, you have an art box when you shouldn't, etc. Really stupid simple. Markzware, Enfocus and Callas have similar ideas but with a lot more possible reasons. They've got green check marks or red X's to give a graphical pass/fail indicator.

Everyone comes up with various conditions that must be met for a variety of reasons. What is a meaningful diagnostic result for one company/person is superfluous for another for what ever reason. There are all sorts of criteria that we use to judge the quality of the raw materials all of which have some impact. There are also limits to what we can practically diagnose. For instance I can use software to check if any object (or a specific kind of object) crosses a page box in a particular direction (an object extends beyond the trim box) or an object extends beyond the trim box and lies within the bleed box. This tells me that something is there. But not necessarily *what* is there. Nor does it tell me if it should be there or if it is at all usable.

So yes, to a certain degree this is rocket science IF you are programming a tool to diagnose a document. It can also be rocket science if you want to generate a very thorough diagnosis as a user. It can be presented as a very technical diagnosis to the end user (supplier in our case). Imagine reading your doctors lab report and trying to understand it. You rely upon them to translate it into something meaningful to you. "Your glycemic index is y, your HDL/LDL ratio is 1:1.3, your t-cell count is z (I'm just pulling these out of the air). What the heck am I supposed to do with that? Tell me "you've got diabetes, you bad cholesterol is too high and it's hard for you to fight infections". Similarly we can use all sorts of technical means to diagnose a piece of art and give us a laymens interpretation either through software or a human. I've helped set up look up tables for a specific reported error which can be substituted by a human friendly interpretation. "Your TAC exceeds 245% for an area of .375". Hmm... Okay WTF? How about "There is too much ink in dark portions of your art, we need to fix that". That's not quite so much rocket science is it? So now it's not so much an issue of reporting but usability. All the tools don't do quite so good of a job of giving a usable result when you say "the average PERSON". For a printing professional it's just fine.

We can build processes that say "your business card is not the right size, there is some print that is too small and you are using colors we can't use." Where the machine is actually saying "the trim box does not equal 3.5 x 2, uses type that is less than 7 pts, ICC based RGB is present, spot colors do not use an alternate color space of CMYK or device gray".

The technology exists to enable us as print providers to make the reports more accessible. The technology exists to enable developers to create human friendly versions of their reports. Or at least give the ability to customers to create human friendly versions of the reports.l

Preflighting very well may be rocket science if your not "in the know". But that doesn't mean that we can't make it more friendly for those who are not.

If nothing else we need to actually consider the fact that we are in a manufacturing based industry. We make things from raw materials. Therefore we need to examine our raw materials and grade them against some sort of standard so that we can as best as possible control what comes in. Even if we can't control what comes in by sending it back and asking for something different we can at least know what we are dealing with as early in the process as possible. The more info we have the earlier the better we can make scheduling and production decisions. We can also alert our suppliers (customers too) that there are issues that need to be worked out and therefore schedules may need to be altered based on the results of the quality control process.

We are in an industry where margins may be razor thin for a number of different reasons. So we must be very careful about what we produce so that we waste as little materials and time as possible. It seems that far too many companies are happy to do something twice because it was inconvenient to spend a few minutes up front to check for issues because of a tight deadline (for example). Whereas if we spent a few minutes using technology to help get us meaningful information as quickly and early as possible maybe we would reduce the operating costs and spoilage. Who knows... Maybe we'll just "loose less money". Dare I say we might even be profitable?

Call it what ever you want. But in the end if nothing else it's a way to cover your ass in case shit happens.
 
Preflight tools at the job entry stage have been a major slow down in the production environments that I have worked in. Years ago we bought into the whole FlightCheck idea and it did a great job, but it didn't save us money. There are companies out there who dedicate an employee or employees to preflighting jobs.

In todays workflow the rip is all ready preflighting. It take the prep operator the same amount of time to open the job and link the fonts and images as it does the preflighter. The next step is to create a PDF and drop it into the workflow which is going to preflight it for you anyway. There is no reason to do the same work twice.
 
@c26sail
Well there is preflight and post-preflight. The jobs that fail preflight still need to be taken care of. In a rush job, it is often faster to do a preflight in app and then fix the problems. How many problems you foresee is dependant on the foresight of the operator.
There is always an element of common sense. Some technical "errors" which will not create a problem, and some technically correct files that will not be able to survive press and post-press. (as matt points out)
 
Preflight before PDF FlightCheck

Preflight before PDF FlightCheck

Great comments and discussion from all and would love to hear more.

Quality assurance is something graphic designers and publishers inherently need to be concerned about at the preflight level of the native digital file. If they can do that via training the users to spot often invisible things with the tools in the layout apps, that is great. But there should be no excuse for continued preflight errors being pushed down the line.

David Creamer said it well with this quote,

“Preflighting should happen even before the PDF is even created. Bad files make bad PDFs. That’s why programs such as FlightCheck are so invaluable.“

See:
"Bad files make bad PDFs. That's why programs such as FlightCheck are so invaluable." - David Creamer

@David (above in this thread - so, a lot of David's around preflighting), you will also notice at the end of that url link, this viewpoint:

"Preflighting is both an art and a science"

It is often *both* a manufacturing process as well as a creative one. The art of the craft these days often comes down to mixing oil with water and preflight tools will certainly help in that aim.
 
After poking around in Pitstop Pro, I've determined that it does tell me exactly what I was looking for. Because a lot of our clientele are do it yourselfers, they don't pay much attention to what they are doing with ink coverage. The printers that we've been outsourcing our work to have been adjusting ink density behind the scenes without us really knowing what they are doing. Pitstop points out when ink coverage exceeds a threshold. I was hoping it had tools to correct this but I can't find info on it. I have found a wealth of information about how to do it in Photoshop though. For any of you interested in Pitstop Pro, I found a site that sells it for much less than Enfocus themselves. PitStop Professional 2009. Apparently they are rated A- with the BBB. You may want to hold out though. Version 10 is set to release sometime this month.

Now I'm going to check out Callas toolbox as many of you have suggested. Perhaps it is easier to use or more intuitive. It appears to be about the same price as Enfocus sells their product for, which is around $700.
 
Well now... This comes full circle...

So now that you have meaningful and useful information what do we do about it? What information is it that you have? There is a lot of information that PitStop, Acrobat Pro, Callas and FlightCheck can generate.

FlightCheck is great at diagnosing issues in native files and PDF's but can't fix.

Acrobat Pro's built in preflight tools work great and make some corrections. There's a lot of power in Acrobat Pro itself.

Then you've got PitStop and pdfToolbox which are very similar in many respects and different in a few others. PitStop can apply device link profiles, so can pdfToolbox. They both can diagnose and correct incorrect color spaces but in different ways. PitStop handles color a bit differently than pdfToolbox which isn't bad, but isn't necessarily good either. pdfToolbox comes as a stand alone product or as a plug-in (both can be installed if you don't want to suffer the sluggishness of Acrobat Pro), PitStop is only a plug-in. PitStop has a bit more of a technical interface, pdfToolbox has an extremely friendly iPhone like interface. pdfToolbox can convert Office or OpenOffice documents to PDF (if Office or OpenOffice are installed), PitStop itself doesn't do that without the assistance of Acrobat Pro. pdfToolbox can flatten transparency (in the standalone product and plug-in) whereas PitStop needs Acrobat to do that as a separate process. pdfToolbox can flatten overprints, PitStop can't. PitStop has actions, pdfToolbox doesn't, PitStop can interactively edit a PDF, pdfToolbox can't. But you can make interactive edits with Acrobat Pro and Illustrator/PhotoShop.

It's a give and take so you need to evaluate which one fits your needs best. If you're dealing with "amateurs" then pdfToolbox may be the better choice because of the way it handles color, specifically in regards to Office documents.

Now regarding the website you mentioned, that's a pretty cheap price, quite a bit less than I can buy it for as a reseller. Seems a bit too good to be true. But there are promos going on, maybe they've ended I haven't checked yet, about buying Pro 9 and getting a free upgrade to 10.
 

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