Native Document Preflight

[Skinflint]

Does anyone know of any preflight software for native applications other the Markzware Flightcheck?

 

[prepressdork]

FlightCheck is pretty much the defacto standard for what you're looking to do. Out of curiosity, why not use FlightCheck?

pd

 

[Dov Isaacs]

There is a preflight facility built directly into InDesign that costs you absolutely nothing extra to use.

 

[YourCastle]

I no longer use preflight software because too many of my clients will increase the resolution of a photo from web to 300dpi and my software won't catch that, but it's still pixelated.

So I'm back to manual preflighting.

 

[prepressdork]

Ah ok. Unfortunately, I don't know of any preflight (or other) software that can warn if an image "looks" low-res even when the document resolution is 300. I've had to explain to my customers many times that increasing the resolution of a low-res photo will not improve the look of it.

 

[abc]

There's some interesting work going on with AI and Machine Learning on 'Image Quality'
But nothing that's ready for prime time yet, but it is a fast moving technology

Link added for information

Deep Image Quality Assessment

Deep dive into full-reference image quality assessment. From subjective image quality experiments to deep objective image quality metrics.

towardsdatascience.com

 

[Dov Isaacs]

I no longer use preflight software because too many of my clients will increase the resolution of a photo from web to 300dpi and my software won't catch that, but it's still pixelated.

So I'm back to manual preflighting.

The biggest fallacy associated with preflighting is that automated preflighting (whether in an authoring/design application, in Acrobat for PDF print publishing workflows, or at the RIP) is adequate or sufficient. Although such preflighting is useful, there are definitely false positives and false negatives. This is especially true with regards to raster images in terms of resolution, sharpness, and/or overall quality. Ultimately you need to visually preflight the content or you are setting yourself up for failure.

And any “fixups” are really dependent on the individual images themselves. Using simple up-sampling of image resolution (such as in Photoshop) to achieve some magical DPI considered “correct” generally does not solve anything other than yielding a bulkier file retaining whatever “issues” there were in the original image.

Per the response of my colleague abc, there definitely is “some interesting work going on with AI and Machine Learning on ‘Image Quality.’ Some such capabilities are already appearing in products from some software vendors including Adobe and ON1 allowing for increasing resolution and increasing detail without pixelation. But these features are not currently nor probably will never be such that they could or should automatically applied to all raster image content. Similar concepts apply to automatic image “sharpening” (the best solution for unsharp raster images is to properly focus the camera when initially shooting ).

- Dov

 

[YourCastle]

The biggest fallacy associated with preflighting is that automated preflighting (whether in an authoring/design application, in Acrobat for PDF print publishing workflows, or at the RIP) is adequate or sufficient. Although such preflighting is useful, there are definitely false positives and false negatives. This is especially true with regards to raster images in terms of resolution, sharpness, and/or overall quality. Ultimately you need to visually preflight the content or you are setting yourself up for failure.

And any “fixups” are really dependent on the individual images themselves. Using simple up-sampling of image resolution (such as in Photoshop) to achieve some magical DPI considered “correct” generally does not solve anything other than yielding a bulkier file retaining whatever “issues” there were in the original image.

Per the response of my colleague abc, there definitely is “some interesting work going on with AI and Machine Learning on ‘Image Quality.’ Some such capabilities are already appearing in products from some software vendors including Adobe and ON1 allowing for increasing resolution and increasing detail without pixelation. But these features are not currently nor probably will never be such that they could or should automatically applied to all raster image content. Similar concepts apply to automatic image “sharpening” (the best solution for unsharp raster images is to properly focus the camera when initially shooting ).

- Dov

umm, yeah, that's what i said?

EDIT: maybe you quoted me, but were just making a generic statement?

 

[Dov Isaacs]

umm, yeah, that's what i said?

EDIT: maybe you quoted me, but were just making a generic statement?

I wasn't contradicting you at all, but rather expanding on the topic such that this didn't just appear as a subjective opinion.

 

[Skinflint]

FlightCheck is pretty much the defacto standard for what you're looking to do. Out of curiosity, why not use FlightCheck?

pd

Well we do use Flightcheck. It is currently only supporting CS 2019. And, the next version will be called Express. We have tried beta version and it is not liked by our preflight tech. I can't go into details as I have not sat behind the beta version, but I do take the word of my tech, she has been preflighting for more than 20 years.
So we are looking to see if anything else exist out there.

 

[abc]

For native documents apart from the options previously stated there's nothing else.
The only other option would be to preflight the output PDF, not the incoming native document.
The added benefit of checking the PDF is of course is it could be automated, plus PDF preflight functionality offers a lot more checks and customisability (plus fixes) to those available in Flightcheck.

 

[Dov Isaacs]

For native documents apart from the options previously stated there's nothing else.
The only other option would be to preflight the output PDF, not the incoming native document.
The added benefit of checking the PDF is of course is it could be automated, plus PDF preflight functionality offers a lot more checks and customisability (plus fixes) to those available in Flightcheck.

One thing to add is that automated preflight and especially fixups have tremendous dangers in terms of false positives and false negatives. Over the years, I've seen quite a few perfectly fine documents (source and PDF) messed up by blind reliance on this automation. Such software is simply one very useful tool to assist in document preparation and prepress operations.

- Dov

 

[davidmwe]

Dov is right, automated preflight is good to a degree but dangerous or deadly on another. First and foremost, the new FlightCheck 2022 is out in beta. That has all of the modern InDesign, Acrobat, Illustrator, etc 2022 support. Even an "Edit in Acrobat" aid for you PDF preflighters out there! You can sign-up here for that: FlightCheck 2022 Beta!
Most importantly for the OP, FlightCheck 2022 excels at native file support, in a stand-alone fashion. It even provides a "Preview" of your file, which is extremely useful. I think you'll be very happy with what you see! (Here is a YouTube playlist showing you how it all works)

We're close to a pre-release, so please feel free to provide any feedback you may have after using in production.