Using an IGen 3 to "develop" digital photographs

[Roy]

Hi All,

This is my first post here and I have a question that we have been unable to figure out at our shop here. We are an online printer whose work flow is based on prinergy. The boss has come to our prepress department and asked us to figure out how to start sending photographs in mass to one of our Xerox IGen 3's. What he wants is us to recieve unformatted photographs, shrink them down to the correct size, and to print them quickly.

I can think of no easy way to impose this automagically in prinergy(although we are still at prinergy 3, and are getting 4 and insite in the next couple weeks)

Anyone have any suggestions on how to do this? My initial thought is to do a preview of the photos to see which way is up, correcting any that are not in the correct orientation, then do a photoshop batch action to get the photos to the correct size, and to save them to a PDF.

From there we need to impose them either in prinergy, or directly on the IGen(which we have never tried to do before, as we never have had to, anyone with experience on this?)

Roy

 

[John Roberds]

Re: Using an IGen 3 to "develop" digital photographs

We had a similar request and got it done with some programming. We used C# to load an image, measure its size, and calculate how it needed to be transformed. The C# code then generated PPML code to actually layout the page with the image re-sized for printing. The PPML code, along with the images, was sent to the RIP. We had to assume the images were the correct orientation and we didn’t crop or distort the image. If you have to worry about orientation or cropping somebody is going to have to look at the images.

John

 

[WharfRat]

Re: Using an IGen 3 to "develop" digital photographs

You should be able to write an InDy script that would run on a folder to:
place an image - fit to frame - export PDF to a hot folder.

MSD

 

[Roy]

Re: Using an IGen 3 to "develop" digital photographs

Anyone have a good resource to start learning about indesign scripting? We dont have anyone in the shop with experience in it.

Roy

 

[LoneGoose]

Re: Using an IGen 3 to "develop" digital photographs

Roy,

If you already know AppleScript or JavaScript then you should consult the 'extra resources' CD in the Creative Suite box. It's got PDF tutorials describing how to script any of the CS apps. If you don't already know AppleScript or JavaScript then you need to start with one of those before attempting to script InDesign.

-Nicolas

 

[Roy]

Re: Using an IGen 3 to "develop" digital photographs

Working on Apple scripting right now,

Luckily we are going to develop some other easier things first then the photos, so I guess it will be a learning process

Roy