Has Proofing Gone ‘Soft’?

That’s a ‘hard’ question to answer, vendors say.

January 2007 by Jean-Marie Hershey

multipage

These days, the proof isn’t just in the pudding. It’s on screen and on the move, instantaneously bound for far-flung destinations along the information superhighway, a pixilated facsimile of the real thing. The advantages are obvious: reduced cycle time, fewer interim proofs, and a richer collaborative environment, for starters. But how applicable are the principles of remote proofing to the realm of package printing? This month we spoke with Tyler Harrell, solutions and innovations manager, Esko-Graphics; Gee Ranasinha, director of marketing, DALiM Software; Jim Summers, president of GMG Americas; and John Sweeney, vice president, sales and marketing, Integrated Color Solutions to learn just how far remote proofing technology has come in the packaging world and where it is heading.

pP: What is the difference between soft proofing and remote proofing?

Summers—We think of soft proofing as a scenario where you’ve got a monitor on your desktop. The designer is preparing a concept, a comp, or a final page at some point during the creative process, and they use that monitor to do a couple of things: to check physical size of things or the accuracy of placement. They also may go down several levels to verifying that the package on the screen or in print is the right color. And as soon as you branch into that area in terms of validation of what’s on the monitor, you go from the monitor as display to the monitor as proof. Whether it’s remote or not is a matter of who is using that monitor and where. If the monitor is in front of the designer, and the designer is creating and getting the feedback from the monitor, I wouldn’t consider that remote. However, if that monitor is being echoed and displayed at the consumer product company upstream, that is a remote proofing application.

Harrell—There’s a big distinction between real-time proofing and remote proofing. Real-time proofing essentially is always soft proofing. I don’t know that in today’s environment the soft proof is replacing the contract proof. The benefits are that you have something the customer and the vendor can immediately see and discuss. The opportunity for revisions is certainly promoted in an environment of collaboration. But quite often what is missing or perceived to be missing is color accuracy. More and more clients/customers/buyers want to see a proof printed on something as close to a representative of, if not the real material it’s going to be printed on; the screen can simulate this, but obviously can’t fulfill it. The soft proofing environment is more of a collaborative tool than a contract approval, and the fact remains that color management is the biggest hurdle in this whole process.

• MORE ON
• COLOR/QUALITY CONTROL