Hi, everybody. David Dilling for Markzware,
and today we're gonna talk about
preflighting. Why do we need to preflight?
Firstly, Markzware. We created the
preflight niche back in 1994 or so, with FlightCheck.
The term pre-flight was coined after a
man by the name of Chuck Weger
had, like, you know, borrowed from the
airplane, you know, aeronautical industry.
Before you take off, you want to do a
pre-flight check. They do do a pre-flight
check (at least, we hope, when we fly), to
make sure everything's going to be okay for
the flight. That helps, you know, greatly
reduce the likelihood of a
catastrophic problem.
Unfortunately, in design for print, there
are quite a few problems. But we do have
the ability to stop these problems, and
why do we do that? Because… Look at this chart here.
One problem can create a
whole host of waste and costly errors.
So, it's very important to preflight at every step in the
workflow and to
preflight, yourself, at every phase, major phase,
within the design process, whether it's every
page or, you know, every day,
and you have to look at that, yourself,
how you, how you, you know, actually do that.
I know people who preflight just about every
image before they put it in a
file. That’s, you know, maybe going a
little too far, but, hey, it's actually
really smart. Don't have much time, so
we're just going to cover the top main
preflight problems. What are they and how
can you maybe stop them, or be at least
be aware of them. Missing things,
missing images. Well, missing images is, of course, you
know, quite logical. If you don't have the
image available to embed in the
PDF when you export the PDF or the image available for
packaging, you know… If you have an
Illustrator file, you want to package it together,
send it to the printer for some
packaging you designed… If you don't have
the image linked, the image is missing.
You won't be able to package it.
The printer won't be able to print it, you know,
print it properly. It might be
there onscreen. You see it, but it's
actually not physically there.
Very important, missing elements. Missing fonts
another part of missing elements.
You need to have your fonts available to
embed them properly, or to package them,
to send to the next party in the
workflow, so they can load those fonts.
That might include screen and printer
fonts. So, of course, all different types
of fonts. We can jump into fonts and I
could spend probably
20 minutes, just talking about fonts, and
TrueType, and all the different types of
fonts you could use or not use, and
that's a whole other element. But you
have to also check what types of
fonts you're gonna use in your workflow.
Overprint and knockout. Very important, you
know, the overlapping of elements. This is
where preflight meets, as both a
science and an art, because it’s something you
have to look at visually. Pre-flight will
tell you, hey, you have overprint or
knockout used on these pages and you
could, like… FlightCheck will take you
right to the problem, so you can look at
it and check out is, you know, the
color going to be inadvertently, you know,
changed, because of the overlapping? You
know, if you put two colors over each
other, in certain levels of transparency
or not, it could cause problems. And
that's something you’re going to have to check
yourself. And, you know, the knockout
could cause also white borders coming
around, if the registration is not set
correctly. And a lot of other hosts of
problems that could happen, if you don't
do that overlapping quite right. So,
incorrectly-specified colors. Very
important to check the color model and
to communicate with your printer. That's
a big tip to remember. Communication with your
printer or the next party in the workflow.
If you insert RGB images used in an
InDesign layout, or Quark, whatever might be,
make a PDF and then, it goes into a
CMYK workflow, you're gonna get undesired,
you know, your red’s going to print brown, all
kind of weird stuff, you know. So, you need
to make sure you understand how it's
going to be output. Don’t use
RGB colors in a CMYK workflow.
No. Don't use too many spot colors.
You don’t want to have, you know, hundreds…
Well, hundreds might be… You don't want to have, like,
thirty different colors used, if
you're only printing a 4, you know,
4-color output. The more color used, the
more expensive it's going to be.
Understand the job.
Don't use too many colors. And check the
color modes. Make sure that they're, you
know, what you desire. Image resolution. Of
course, image resolution is very
important. There's also the effective
resolution. So, if you have a file that's
going to print properly in a small little
box on a U.S. Letter size page, and you
check it, the effective resolution might
be fine, 300 and something DPI.
Great. But that same image, if used at
full, a full page, might not be fine.
It might be a low res, effective resolution-wise.
So, that's what you want to watch out for,
that the image resolution on the image
itself is proper,
you know, resolution, but that it’s
300dpi and the size used is also going to
be at the proper resolution. So, these are
very important things to check out.
There’s a whole science behind that. You’re going to have
to study that yourself in your extra time.
Likewise, with scans, when you scan in
an image, you make sure the LPI and DPI,
you know, the lines per inch, is
proper for printing. So, you can do a 300dpi,
600 dpi, that should be fine.
But make sure you don't scan any
lower than that, if you're going to go into
print, because it won't print properly.
It’ll be all fuzzy and, you know, not desirable.
These are major problems. You see them in
newspapers and magazines all the time.
Just take a look at your newspaper and
look for missing fonts, fonts that were
substituted, or missing images.
You’ll find stuff all over. Ink coverage.
Ink coverage is something that, you know,
you think, “Well, I want black, so I'm going
to have everything, you know, 100%. I want, you know,
100% black.” But if your ink coverage is
too great in any one area, it might bleed
through thin paper. Particularly,
newspapers, or those thin newspapers,
would just bleed right through, you know.
So, you have to make sure that you're,
even though if you want a hundred
percent black, you might only need 60%
black, you know, to get the
desired effect. So, once again, depends on
the output and the final job.
Hey, you have page settings, bleed, a lot of other things you
can check for and pre-flight with
FlightCheck and other tools.
Very important to do that. There’s, you know, a
good tip is to download FlightCheck or check out another
preflight product out there and
look at the Ground Controls in
FlightCheck, or the
pre-flight profiles in other tools. And look at all
the problems you can check for and, of
course, a combination of the two can also be
a problem. So, pre-flight is very
important in the workflow. Henry Ford
created the assembly line process back
in the early 1900s, and, you know, printing is also a
manufacturing assembly line process. And
quality assurance, like Henry
Ford introduced, is also being used at
the print shops, to some degree.
That degree varies on which print shop and, you
know, what workflow they have.
So, it's important for you to do that, to help
stop these problems, you know, before they
get downstream. If you put a low res
image in, it goes all the way to print,
it's gonna cost a lot of time and money
for somebody. And, hopefully, it's not you.
So, pre-flight. Save your reports. Let it
be shown, like a court record, you did it
right and pass it on to the next party in the
workflow. Thank you. David Dilling from
Markzware. I hope this has been useful.
Check out our stuff on www.markzware.com.
Good luck with your study and have fun.
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