With all the focus on new kinds of dynamic electronic publishing, it’s easy to forget that printing still plays a major part in design and communication. Most of us have to create printed material and making sure colours are consistent and accurate, pictures are sharp and documents are technically correct is a big part of getting that right.
Here’s a checklist of digital pre-press essentials for print production.
1) Calibrate monitors and adjust lights and other visual distractions (such as strong colours on walls, coloured desktop patterns, strong natural light sources) so you can be confident you’re seeing the most accurate colours onscreen.
2) Make sure all your Creative Suite applications are using the same colour set up and policies. All Adobe applications use colour management to define and reference colours. You can synchronise all CSapps by using Bridge. Go to Edit>Creative Suite Colour Settings. Choose a pre-set that matches your location and print process: Europe General Purpose 2 if you’re outputting to European Printing standards or Europe Pre-press 2 if you have higher quality requirements and don’t mind being pestered with notifications from applications. Then click Apply and all your CS apps will be configured to use the same settings. Note that, if theses settings defaulted to North American settings, your colours are being defined for US Newspaper printing and your CS has probably been installed with the wrong default language.
3) Digitise pictures using RGB colour mode and don’t convert to CMYK too early. Though all images have to be converted to CMYK eventually, the change is irreversible and reduces quality. Wait until you are completely finished with all colour and tonal adjustments before converting to CMYK. Avoid switching back and forward between RGB and CMYK as the change is destructive and should be done as little as possible.
4) When working with images, keep a high resolution, RGB original complete with all layers, masks, paths etc. Make a copy for each output (print, web etc) and flatten, resize and convert the copy to the correct colour mode. You can always generate another version from an RGB master file.
5) Use Photoshop Gamut warning feature to highlight pixel areas that will change colour when converted to CMYK, you can then adjust hue, saturation etc to your satisfaction while being confident about how they will be converted to CMYK.
6) Use InDesign and Illustrator Separation Preview panels to show how your documents will separate into CMYK. These also display overprinting attributes so you can check when colours are printing on top of each other correctly.
7) If you have applied transparency or even just a drop shadow, use InDesign’s Flattener Preview to predict how flattening will affect your document.
87) Use InDesign’s Live Pre-flight tool to automatically check for pre-press issues such as image resolution and colour space, bleed and trim hazards, overprinting issues and more.
9) Make sure you chose the correct PDF preset when creating your print ready PDF. Some presets downsample image resolution and convert colour to sRGB, others convert to CMYK, some support transparency and others don’t. If in doubt, consult with your print shop or, better still, ask them for a custom preset so you can make the PDF to their specification.
10) User Acrobat to verify colours, resolution, bleeds and rich blacks in any PDF prior to sending out to print.
