Back in the Day, Back in the Day...

This week I heard more cool stories -

Stories like, "I remember way back when..."

Pre-Press was a laborious process:

...where every single image was given individual attention.
...where every color had a piece of film.
...and we cut, copied, and pasted things onto a production board.
...and we were many: film strippers and camera men, platers, and more.

But now, what would have taken 3-10 hours and many more employees using conventional Pre-Press to accomplish, digital can do in just 1 hour with fewer workers. Here is the flow of digital pre-press at Watermark Press:

We use Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design, and Preps to prepare the clients' native files: all the fonts, and all the images, culminating in a specified design layout, and ultimately, the layout in which we will print the work in larger quantities.

The Preps program assists in assigning this press layout, whether it is Sheetwise, Work and Turn, or Work and Tumble (which I will describe in greater detail during my Press rotation). Using Preps, we go through processes of laying out page size, gutters, bleeds, orientation, trim marks, pagination, die lines, and visual tools for quality control such as color bars, step wedges and take-off bars. Tim has appropriately named some helpful programs "Marks of the Beast" and "Take Off Ehh!!!" to assist with marks and colorizing take-off bars.

Basically, we are making the files that we receive more compatible with our technologies here. We are also foreseeing any problems before they emerge on the press, and making sure the press run is as efficient as possible. So much of pre-press is being a detective, and knowing how to speak to our various machines.

The language spoken by most modern day printing technology is Post Script. Post Script acts as a translator for the aforementioned programs, translating, for example, an In Design file into a Page Description Language (PDL) that printers can understand. That language is made up of directions regarding all the imposition assignments we gave. We save our files in Post Script, move them into Prinergy Workshop in order to get them all lined-up and ready for Prinergy, which outputs them into our various pre-press proofing devices: the Integris, the Ink Jet, and the Trendsetter (used for higher quality Spectrum proofs, and also for making plates.)

In addition to reviewing the overall pre-press process flow with Tim, Jim helped me revisit the concepts of line screen, and half-tone dots of ink, where each ink color is assigned a standard dot angle, thus eliminating interference, a printing no-no called moiré. I learned how to check for line screen, and how to tell the difference between Stochastic and AM screening. Stochastic is made up of equal size dots with variable spacing, producing the effect of higher or lower ink density. AM, or Amplitude Modulated screening varies the dot size with equal spacing between the dots, also affecting the perception of the ink's density.

If my learning process here resembled a line screen, I would have to call it stochastic. I come into bits of knowledge so frequently and so randomly, but everything, however small, is equally relevant and important. The more I come into knowledge, the more deep and vibrant the colors become: the more competent and confident I can hope to feel in due time. After all, it's all the half-tones, collectively, that make up the whole picture. And I'm just in the pre-pre-press stages of a career in print, trying to design something I can really be proud of.

And "pictures are not passive", according to Jim's 1998 copy of the Warren Standard's "How to Read a Press Sheet." Printing, instead, is a "process that demands reading images diligently and learning to communicate so that others can see the same things."

On that note, my career will require all the labor, editing, and effort of the printing industry back in the day... It will take many hours, and many diligent, print-savvy minds to communicate to me the understanding of print, past and present, that I'm seeking today.

And I hope that's okay.