Re: Mini-rant on the surreal world of "prepress"
Re: Mini-rant on the surreal world of "prepress"
- Subject: Re: Mini-rant on the surreal world of "prepress"
- From: Martin Orpen <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:05:14 +0100
On 21 Apr 2010, at 22:45, Marco Ugolini wrote:
> Oh, the temptation to wreak mighty vengeance upon such stupefying ignorance
> was strong, believe you me, Brian.
Hell hath no fury like a prepress noob scorned...
I think the vengeance on stupefying ignorance has already been wrought... by the expert at the printers.
The first rule of Print Club...
Printers only believe in one type of CMYK.
Whereas Prepress Professionals know that there are two types of CMYK -- that's why we get to work in clean and quiet offices and are even allowed to talk to customers sometimes.
Deciding which of the two types of CMYK to give the printer is a crucial part of our job and a prepress pro would NEVER call the printer because:
1. It's unnecessary
2. It's pointless
If their technical specifications don't make any sense who'd be dumb enough to call them? The best you could hope for would be to get to speak with the person who wrote the technical specifications!
The stupefying ignorance about printing is assuming that colour accuracy figures anywhere near the importance of price and meeting deadlines.
Sure you want to believe that the printer takes special care of your magazine page on press -- you and the 63 other people whose pages are sitting on the same signature...
Obviously customer communications from printers aren't going to be up to much -- they always assumed there'd be the buffer of the prepress industry protecting them telling customers how things really work.
The unvarnished and simplified version could easily be reduced to a couple of sentences:
A. Don't waste our time with stuff that we can't dump straight to plate.
B. We use US CMYK (as in Universal Standard) -- characterised very precisely by what comes out the other end of the press using the settings that yield the fewest complaints from the people who pay the bills.
The surreal bit of prepress is that everybody conspired to prematurely consign it to the history book of no longer needed craft skills... following on from typesetting, compositing, block making and wood engraving etc etc.
For those of us trying to keep the flame alive, even the word we use to describe our daily endeavour is in the process of being dumped and replaced by the more generic and baggage-free term "pre media".
The only thing that keeps me going nowadays is a regular supply of stories of crushed expectations harvested from mailing lists that are frequented by designers, photographers and colour management consultants.
Thanks for posting.
--
Martin Orpen
Idea Digital Imaging Ltd
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