Quick Printing

FEB 2015

Quick Printing is the resource for the Commercial printing, visual and graphic arts industries. Since 1977, Quick Printing has focused on improving efficiency and increasing sales and profits in the print shop. Industry experts share their ideas and

Issue link: https://quickprinting.epubxp.com/i/455911

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 17 of 35

18 Quick Printing | February 2015 MyPRINTResource.com Ultimate's Impostrip prepress automation software now includes AutoFlow Ganging, which automatically gangs jobs optimally on a sheet—and can even gang based on fnishing. 'I used to have about 10 people in prepress. Now, I'm doing more work with two, given all the tools we have.' By Richard Romano Invisible Touch: As Prepress (D)evolves, It Is Becoming Strictly 'Hands Off' latest iQueue X Universal Color Workfow released in early December 2014. "Controlling labor costs in the shop is huge," Ross noted. "Frankly, it is the difference between staying in or out of business for most of our customers." Automation in some sense began with computerized pagination systems and CEPS, but serious attempts at automation had its roots in the mid 1990s and for a few years around the turn of the millennium one couldn't attend a drupa or a Graph Expo without hearing about JDF and Computer Integrated Manufacturing. There was hype, then there was a backlash—and then JDF slowly began to catch on and become widely adopted. Look, Don't Touch The phrase that crops up more and more when talking about overall production workfows—especially pre- press—is "as few touches as possible." That is, it's neces- sary to send a job through the system with the absolute minimum of manual intervention. M any of us are old enough to remember a time when "prepress" referred to a collection of distinct processes, many of them mechanical. You made negatives and stripped the flm into fats. You made photographic color separations. You made plates. In fact, there used to be entire businesses devoted to just one or two of those processes. Computer hardware and software and related peripherals have whittled away at those prepress processes. Remember color separators? Once a $12 billion (in 2014 dollars) industry, the entire color separation business was essentially replaced by a single command in Adobe Photoshop. "We were visiting one of our customers a week or two ago," said Greg Bane, Pressero channel manager for Aley- ant Systems. Pressero is Aleyant's software as a service (SaaS)-based web-to-print portal. "He brought us into his 'prepress' department which was now two guys. He said, 'I used to have about 10 people here. I'm doing more work with two, given all the tools we have.'" It's no secret that prepress as a discrete process is gradually being absorbed by other parts of the production process, from graphic design and production at one end, and the RIPing/printing on the other. In analog printing process, computer-to-plate has taken steps out of the pro- cess (flmmaking/imagesetting, stripping). Digital printing goes one further, and take platemaking out of the process. The theme to all of the changes to what we today al- most quaintly refer to as "prepress" is automation. "The most important trends around prepress revolve around the substantial progress the industry is seeing in process automation," said John Henze, vice president, Fiery marketing, EFI. "With some of the advanced tech- nologies available today, very little manual intervention is needed, and that is substantially different from where the industry was just a few years ago." Concurring with that sentiment is Robert Ross, CEO of Xanté, which provides PDF workfow and imaging solu- tions for graphic and prepress applications, including its

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Quick Printing - FEB 2015