Hi Marco,
We did quite a bit of research on this problem during the development of QuickPrint 5. There are several tools around that will warn for over inked images. However, just about all preflighting tools (including ours) check after the layout is turned into a PDF file.
Many of our customers work with CMYK images in Photoshop, and pulling down ink has been a time consuming and painful process because you may not know what the ink limit is meant to be until you check against destination specifications.
The one thing we have been recommending for some time is to consider moving to an RGB workflow. Convert to the profile when exporting from InDesign (or in QuickPrint when exporting from Quark).
Without turning this into an ad, our new software also has several features to assist people that create CMYK in Photoshop before placing. We can now check not only the TAC, but also the separation itself on the raw CMYK data. We then added the feature to limit the ink automatically, or when the separation is out altogether we can re-separate the images to the correct profile as well.
Does anyone out there use the InDesign CS2 ink weight preview feature? We currently assign the destination profile (from our specs DB) automatically to InDesign CS2 documents when the user selects a destination. However, it isn't yet hooked up to the ink weight preview feature in InDesign CS2. It makes sense, but if I hooked it up to automatically calculate the ink weight from the ICC profile, would you want to preview ink weight before exporting each job, or is it easier to just have it limited automatically? Tom Beckenham Development Manager, Graphics Group - ADG Adstream (Quickcut) www.qp5.com.au On 02/05/2006, at 1:44 PM, Marco Ugolini wrote: In theory, shouldn't it be feasible to create a TAC-warning feature for CMYK files in Photoshop? Granted, the programming of such a feature may not be easy, and may require more resources than the financial returns in additional sales numbers would warrant. But would it be prohibitive to set up the application so that some sort of visual flag alerts the user to the presence of areas of total ink in a CMYK file that exceed the TAC associated with the assigned profile?
Which makes me wonder: Adobe, any plans in the works to address this? ;-)
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