Imagine if, at the counter of your favourite coffee shop, the little sample plate of chopped-up cupcake was replaced with an image of a blueberry muffin in a digital photo frame. Or perhaps, instead of putting nips of wine into plastic cups at the bottle shop, the shop assistant instead showed you a jpeg of a bottle of Kiwi Sav Blanc.
It just wouldn’t work – some things will never go digital.
But a print job is not a muffin or vino. When it comes to a taste test, the humble proof is print’s version of the freebie on the sample counter. What is a proof if not our best attempts to exactly mimic the printed article, a taste test to get a customer across the line and lock in the sale? For the proof, the internet is a game changer.
Soft proofing is not a new concept, but the question remains: how do you set up a paper-free approval process when your end result is ink on paper? How do you emulate in cyberspace the quality of that Cromalin winding its way through street traffic to your customer, their agency and designers?
SOS managing director Michael Schulz sees online proofing as a solution for reducing costs of hard proofs, especially for international clients. But he believes online proofing has cultural hurdles to clear and will remain a bit player until more Australian print houses and their clients gain enough confidence to see this approach as a viable alternative. “People still pick up more detail on paper. Agencies, design studios and high-quality print buyers still prefer a hardcopy proof.”
Moreover, Schulz believes electronic proofing creates bad work habits. “Online is seen as cheap and easy to adjust. Last-minute corrections become very-very-last-minute corrections, provided free.”
It is important to distinguish between what kind of work needs to be approved online and what kind needs traditional proofing. Where the media is critical to the job, hardcopy proofing is a must.
Around half of the jobs at Sydney’s Pegasus Printing are internet-proofed, using Fujifilm XMF Remote soft proofing installed in July on its XMF workflow.
The Blacktown company’s pre-press manager, Joe Vassallo, tells ProPrint that soft proofing is ideal for much of its litho, label and commercial digital jobs, and for around a dozen of the magazine titles it prints. “That can save two-and-a-half, three hours’ time to press,” he estimates.
Where colour is absolutely critical, such as for some premium-quality mastheads, Pegasus will stick with hard proofs. Publishers and agencies are happy to visit for press checks.
Stakeholders essentially get to use the Pegasus server as their FTP (file transfer protocol) site. Incoming PDFs are preflighted and XMF generates an Acrobat report that passes the file, or fails it and sends it back to the designer. Each designer can upload a page or a job, which has a published folder inside XMF. Depending on how the customer sets up their folder, and administers it, multiple approval levels are created, and the ‘overall approval’ point can be set. Any errors or changes can be annotated to the file, which is emailed back to the designer, who can upload the corrected file to the folder again.
Pegasus has profiled a plethora of hardware to XMF Remote, including six Heidelberg Speedmasters, five Xerox digital machines, wide-format EFI Rasteks and Vuteks. This removes the need to re-proof if, for example, a customer orders 10,000 offset impressions after a short digital run.
“That saves a lot of time, adds a lot of productivity,” says Vassallo.
Before XMF Remote, Pegasus sometimes sent high- and low-res imposed PDFs to clients, but today’s online approval is a different ballgame. Proofing at Pegasus is on 300dpi rasterised PDF files, certified and matched to the ISO 12647-2 standard, with press densities set accordingly.
Advanced colour management has taken the guesswork out of producing accurate files, and online clients are becoming comfortable with how their printers print, says Vassallo, but in the end, onliners want to sign off on a proof.
“We’re crunching the numbers and producing the file. If the client wants to look at it online and use their monitor as a proofing device, it’s up to the client to put in quality monitors and keep them profiled. The clients to which we’re rolling out the remote proofing are happy with how we print, they know how we print, we know their files, and we’ve given them profiles to match to their monitors.
“We’ve taken proofs over and compared them on-screen and they look good. They’ve got the correct viewing conditions. They also need to keep in mind that they’re looking at a transmitted – not a reflected – image, as you would on paper.”
It is critical that clients profile their monitors. A premium calibration system can make or break the soft-proofing procedure. SOS Print & Media, which is a member of Australia’s ColourStandards group, uses Eye One from X-Rite and Gretag Macbeth. Michael Schulz is a big fan of the technology.
The right profile
Eye One calibrates a screen to a known standard, using white points of 5000K, 6500K and the monitor’s native white point. It then profiles the monitor/video card combination and creates a profile of the system. This ink/paper profile, which accurately simulates viewing a hard proof, is then used by Photoshop and other ICC-compatible applications to display images with precision.
There are two schools of thought on how monitors should be profiled. Some pre-press operators say the screen should reflect defined colour values. Others prefer it to accurately reflect the press values, warts and all. A contributor to b4print.com, an online pre-press forum, states it succinctly: “I know my proof matches my press sheet. So, I just need to make my monitor match my proof.”
Soft proofing has evolved from content-only approval to a colour managed process, using proprietary workflows. Homegrown developer Serendipity offers its VeriPress on-press proofware. Built around a touchscreen colour management system, Veripress uses platesetter RIP data to produce verified colour-matched proofs.
Led by its full-featured VeriPress Pro product, Serendipity’s range can shoot proofs to remote sites via FTP or secure FTP, to a Veripress remote server in the same Serendipity Blackmagic image format used for the soft proofs. The file format maintains data integrity, preserving process and spot-colour LAB values, and enabling remote users with the same calibrated Veripress configuration to view a certified, identical proof.
Screen offers RiteApprove for online job submission, remote proofing and approval solution within Trueflow SE. Peter Scott, Screen’s northern region manager, believes the core functionalities of soft and remote proofing have not advanced exponentially since the late 1990s, but technology has simplified the steps. “Sure, there have been gains with calibrated monitors such as Eizo’s ColorEdge series and the inkjet proof printers have improved out of sight, some with their own built-in spectrophotometers; but publishers capable of understanding and controlling colour were using these methods back then – it’s just a lot easier and with more choice now. The biggest impact is in the spread of ISO-certified printers, since this greatly facilitates soft and remote proofing.”
Agfa’s Apogee has WebApproval, an interactive portal that can be added to Apogee Pre-press to manage, integrate, convert to PDF and proof pages, says Agfa’s commercial printing manager, Harry Kontogiannis. “It enables retrieval of files and proofs from our customer‘s customers, typically the print buyer, in an organised fashion and enables them to save time and money by eliminating delivery of hardcopy proofs.”
Kodak’s remote proofing is within the Insite Pre-Press Portal in Prinergy. All job information is visible in real time and accessible from anywhere over the web. Printers can receive customer files directly in Prinergy, and offer customers, pre-press operators and service reps secure web access for remote job submission, progress tracking, collaboration, remote proofing and approvals, as well as automating the most critical workflow phases.
Heidelberg has integrated its Remote Access product into Prinect, so that information, approval and coordination processes in the production workflow are automated, reducing time and labour costs. Communication between all parties to a project becomes more convenient, reliable and transparent.
Both EFI and reseller DES offer EFI Colorproof XF Satellite for work across multiple locations that involves process, print and verification via RPF (remote printing file) formats or ‘remote containers’. RPFs are files sent to the remote-proof job recipient to produce remote contract proofs. Dedicated XF Satellite packages installed in remote locations provide full flexibility in processing RPF files.
State of the art
Soft-proofing is no longer considered low-quality, but state-of-the-art, asserts EFI’s production marketing manager, Chris Schowalter. “The big change is the continuous improvement of the screens.”
Graphics software reseller DES offers CGS Oris Color Tuner/Web as an online soft and hardcopy proofing package, with proofs matched to standards like Fogra, GRACoL, SWOP and 3DAP, says DES account manager Ian Bain. He says Oris Color Tuner/Web removes the risk of making the wrong decision by offering an integrated hardcopy and virtual proofing system. By combining the features of the two, Oris Color Tuner and Oris Soft Proof, into Oris Color Tuner/Web, CGS provides “the ultimate flexibility in colour proofing technology – from one package and with risk-free and reliable results”. Meanwhile, Oris Certified Web offers pre-flight checking and notification of errors.
GMG’s Oceania sales manager, Garry Muratore, predicts that with the roll-out of the National Broadband Network, businesses will increasingly move much of their digital communication into the cloud. “Remote proofing will no doubt grow faster on the back of the move.”
The vendor’s Colorproof platform, available from GMG and Kayell Australia, has soft and remote proofing components. Late last year, GMG launched Proofr.com, a global web-based grid of remote proofing locations, providing online proofing to GMG’s standards. Users can order a colour-accurate contract proof in GMG quality, and select a Proofr partner in their area for the job. This partner produces the proof in the recipient’s vicinity, sending it out within hours, and payment is through PayPal.
It’s a nifty idea, and one that other vendors are likely to parallel.
Taking a broader view, virtual proofing is not just a way to slash the courier bill, save on output devices and land a proof before the eyes of a customer in another hemisphere. Creative content now covers a wide array of media, including documents, presentations (PowerPoint), web content (html, jpeg) and interactive (Flash) content, all of which need to be signed off. Printers are now finding themselves in the company of retailers, pharmaceuticals manufacturers and financial services providers – all of them denizens of a wider proofing community. The old adage, about not selling print but communications, springs to mind.
Kit list
• Proprietary workflow such as Kodak Prinergy, Heidelberg Prinect, Fujifilm XMF or Agfa Apogee
• Soft/remote-proofing portal within that workflow product
• A profiled high-end display, such as an Eizo ColorEdge CG245W, or the high-end models from consumer manufacturers such as NEC, Viewsonic or Samsung
• Screen calibrator, such as X-Rite’s Eye One
• Standardised lighting around monitors
• For hardcopy proofs remotely sent, a calibrated light booth for consistent viewing
• Colour standard. See www.colourstandards.com.au) for more
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