The ABC's of Press Checks

All kinds of things, good and bad, will make you wait. Sometimes there will be a break in the roll of paper, in which case printing will stop so that the paper can be disentangled from the press rollers and then refed into the machine. Occasionally there will be a flaw in a printing plate, and someone will need to run down to prepress and get a fresh plate made. This is why it's important that the printer hold all your files, even if you send the job to it by high-resolution PDF: It may need to fix something that necessitates going back to the digital file.

Occasionally a printer will allow you to actually step up to the press and watch as the pages come off the press. When that is possible, the press check can go faster because copies of the pages are not being walked that long, long haul between the presses and the waiting room. But legalities being what they are, often printers prefer to keep their clients away from the noise and the perceived danger of the press floor.

There are many opportunities to learn from great printers, so be sure to ask lots of questions. Learn how the company's work is done, take tours of the prepress and bindery, and ask more questions. Then, as you review the color be confident that your concerns are justified enough to make known.

Remember that this is not the time to be shy or coy — the press check is your chance to make your catalog all it's meant to be.

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Carol Worthington-Levy is partner, creative services, at San Raphael, CA-based catalog consultancy Lenser. For a free guide on printing and prepress, e-mail her at carol.worthington-levy@LENSER.com.

Carol Worthington-Levy will be one of the marketing professionals providing free catalog critiques at this year's Annual Conference for Catalog and Multichannel Merchants (ACCM), held May 21-23 in Boston. Learn more about the conference at www.ACCMshow.com.

	Before the press check

The printing press is not the place for wholesale color corrections. It's imperative to the success of your printed piece that all the color on the job is as close to perfect as possible before you send your files to the printer. Here are a few things to do prior to press check to help ensure the high quality of your catalog:

• Make the most of the photography you have

  If art is provided by your suppliers or you've gotten stuck with a lot of pick-up shots, you may have to go in and clean up the photos. I usually find this means opening it in Adobe Photoshop to make sure the size is correct (at least 300 DPI, or dots per inch) and “opening up” some of the darker areas on the photos, which will tend to run dark on press.

• Run real proofs with the printer who is running your job

  If you are proofing this out of your own studio, your color printer is probably not calibrated to the same standards as your printer's is, so what looks great on your printer might look muddy after it hits the press. By seeing how pages look on the printer's calibrated proofs, you can lighten and clean up a bit more if necessary.

• Design with a knowledge of the web press

  Too many artists design catalogs for a perfect world and a sheet-fed press. Well, the former doesn't exist and use of the latter is extremely unlikely in the catalog world.

When catalogs that are to be printed on a web press are designed with blocks of body copy reversed out of process color, for instance, you're kicking off what will be a frustrating press check. Perfect dot alignment on a press that is running as fast as a web is not realistic. So if you run black type over a photo, for instance, you'll find yourself struggling to keep the type dark enough to read without compromising the color accuracy of the photo.

While we're on the subject of black type, some catalogers take advantage of the availability of extra press capacity, to run all the type as a black plate separate from the black plate used to create the CMYK images. The cost of running the extra black plate is not that high, and the process can decrease the cost of copy revisions, since any corrections you might need to make to the copy would affect just the one plate.
— CW-L