What is Prepress?
When people think about prepress, it’s mostly a question of bringing their image or book to the local printer so it can go to press. The digital prepress business has for a long period been dominated by a company with an apple in their logo. Programs for prepress has also traditionally been dominated by companies like Adobe, Corel, Macromedia etc., and there are often tight bonds between graphics software and printing hardware. This makes it quite easy for the average Mac user to create a digital design and send it straight off to prepress. Since the market has been dominated by Mac for so long, most of the scanners, printers and monitors come with drivers and calibration tools adjusted and written for Mac. The only thing the graphic designer has to do is to get a printing profile from the “print man”, put it in the program, and everything is set as it should be. People can argue about whether this is the right way to go, or whether the user should have more control over settings or pa
Having worked in the printing industry, prepress involves what needs to be done with the artwork from the graphic designer to get it ready to print the actual job. Every printing establishment it different—final proofs signed for approval by client (matchprint), sheet fed presses vs. web presses, color separations of the artwork to film, metal plates vs. paper plates or even direct to plate by the printer, one, two, four and 5 or even 6 color presses. It is valuable experience for the graphic designer to work very closely with many printers to learn how the artwork needs to be prepared in the digital file so that it will ultimately look how it is supposed to in the final process. I was very luck to have my design studio in with a printer for several years. Not only did I work with him for printing the jobs that I did, but the big ones I worked with other printers who had web presses and 6 color presses that could print a 4-color product, plus a spot color (maybe a metallic ink) and a v
Prepress is a term used in the printing industry to describe the process a document must go through before it can be printed. Although it’s usually used in connection with making the plates used in a printing press, prepress can also refer to the process of making a document ready for print in any environment, such as through a laser or other digital printing format. The steps that are considered part of the prepress process vary from company to company, but generally the steps of proofreading, editing, layout, scanning, and color separation are major prepress steps. Some companies may consider the layout and other graphical tasks as part of a graphic design department. Other steps in prepress include converting any digital files into a format that is usable by the printing company, for example, distilling a document into Adobe PDF (portable document format). The usual path that a document takes, from creation to prepress to printing, generally follows three steps. First, the document
Prepress refers to everything that happens to make sure a job is correctly prepared for printing. This is when you catch the errors that could hold up the job on press. For trouble-free printing down the line, it is important to get your design in the best shape possible before upload. Please follow the prepress guidelines below before uploading your project to Inkd.
