Making Digital Magic
March 2000
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What tricks can help printers handle trapping's complexities?
By Terri McConnell
An in-house prepress and plating operation can provide more precise control over image reproduction and can significantly reduce turnaround times, while offering tremendous flexibility for coping with last-minute remakes and inevitable scheduling changes.
Some printers are electing to bring only the final "output" phase of the process in-house. They still rely on trade shops or color separators to perform all the magic required to transform a desktop packaging design into a plate-ready electronic job file that can be fed into a computer-controlled imaging device.
And it is magic; design files supplied by the customer or agency usually require extensive manipulation before they will image correctly for print. The checklist for prepping a design file is long, and it runs from adding a die line to applying a dot gain compensation curve. One item on the list, trapping, is particularly quality-critical and time consuming.
The term "trapping," as it applies to prepress, describes the precise spreading or choking of color areas to accommodate for inexact registration of inks on press. If and when the printer decides to take on all aspects of the prepress operation and stage his own show, he will find that trapping can be as big a challenge as sawing a lady in half and putting her back together again.
Trapping for packaging requires so much specialized knowledge, in fact, many printers are opting for a Facilities Management relationship with a qualified and experienced prepress service provider. In this relationship, the prepress house oversees the printer's prepress operations and may actually purchase, install, and even operate the film and/or plate output devices located at the printing plant. It is the trade shop's responsibility to feed the devices with production-ready electronic data.
But for the packaging printer who wants to bring prepress in-house via a different route than Facilities Management, the trapping issue remains one of the most important aspects of the prepress digital workflow.
Why so difficult?
Packaging graphic designers generally create new layouts using Macintosh or Windows-based Desk Top Publishing (DTP) software programs such as Illustrator, Freehand, Corel Draw, or Quark. These programs were originally developed for broad use by artists and content providers in the commercial printing and publishing markets. They were, and still are, attractively intuitive, but not necessarily functional for either packaging design or prepress production.
Ten years ago companies like Scitex, Linotype-Hell, Dianippon Screen, and Agfa raced to fill the need for high-performance electronic prepress systems that could accept a DTP file and make it ready for digital film output. But they too built their products around the needs of the much larger, and presumably more profitable, commercial printing industry. Pioneering packaging prepress operators had to significantly stretch the limits of the available tools to account for the nuances of packaging printing.
By Terri McConnell
An in-house prepress and plating operation can provide more precise control over image reproduction and can significantly reduce turnaround times, while offering tremendous flexibility for coping with last-minute remakes and inevitable scheduling changes.
Some printers are electing to bring only the final "output" phase of the process in-house. They still rely on trade shops or color separators to perform all the magic required to transform a desktop packaging design into a plate-ready electronic job file that can be fed into a computer-controlled imaging device.
And it is magic; design files supplied by the customer or agency usually require extensive manipulation before they will image correctly for print. The checklist for prepping a design file is long, and it runs from adding a die line to applying a dot gain compensation curve. One item on the list, trapping, is particularly quality-critical and time consuming.
The term "trapping," as it applies to prepress, describes the precise spreading or choking of color areas to accommodate for inexact registration of inks on press. If and when the printer decides to take on all aspects of the prepress operation and stage his own show, he will find that trapping can be as big a challenge as sawing a lady in half and putting her back together again.
Trapping for packaging requires so much specialized knowledge, in fact, many printers are opting for a Facilities Management relationship with a qualified and experienced prepress service provider. In this relationship, the prepress house oversees the printer's prepress operations and may actually purchase, install, and even operate the film and/or plate output devices located at the printing plant. It is the trade shop's responsibility to feed the devices with production-ready electronic data.
But for the packaging printer who wants to bring prepress in-house via a different route than Facilities Management, the trapping issue remains one of the most important aspects of the prepress digital workflow.
Why so difficult?
Packaging graphic designers generally create new layouts using Macintosh or Windows-based Desk Top Publishing (DTP) software programs such as Illustrator, Freehand, Corel Draw, or Quark. These programs were originally developed for broad use by artists and content providers in the commercial printing and publishing markets. They were, and still are, attractively intuitive, but not necessarily functional for either packaging design or prepress production.
Ten years ago companies like Scitex, Linotype-Hell, Dianippon Screen, and Agfa raced to fill the need for high-performance electronic prepress systems that could accept a DTP file and make it ready for digital film output. But they too built their products around the needs of the much larger, and presumably more profitable, commercial printing industry. Pioneering packaging prepress operators had to significantly stretch the limits of the available tools to account for the nuances of packaging printing.
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