The term “pre-press” may have come up at some point if you’ve dealt with a printing business. It is crucial for owners, purchasing agents, designers, and other roles involved in the printing and material manufacturing industry to comprehend this stage of the product development process.
Numerous processes are involved in the printing process, and each step is crucial in its own right. After the printing is finished, there are still a lot of tasks to complete, such as cutting, folding, assembling, and binding. These tasks include design and pre-flighting. These procedures can be applied to only some printed items.
Let’s examine why the prepress service is crucial in the modern era.
Understanding the Significance of Pre-press
Three major parties are involved in the label printing process: the printer, the prepress department, and the designer. Their combined efforts are aimed at making the brand owner satisfied with the printed label. You probably know the designer’s and printer’s roles in bringing this about, but pre-function presses are still a mystery.
The Connections Between Pre-op and Pre-press
To use a medical analogy, the prepress workflow is comparable to the pre-op examination before a surgical procedure in label printing. You would always undergo a series of pre-operative appointments and tests to ensure you are healthy enough for surgery and that the procedure is tailored to your specific needs.
To ensure the most successful surgical outcomes, this step is essential. Similarly, you should first make sure it’s been adjusted to work with the printing method you’ll be employing to achieve the outcomes you’re going for before sending your label design straight to print.
Pre-press is the first step in the label printing process, and the pre-press workflow includes all the interim tasks required to ensure your label design is prepared for the press. As it is a manufacturing process, label printing has tolerances and constraints.
The pre-press team is highly knowledgeable about flexographic and digital printing nuances and the calibration profiles of each press that will be used to print your labels. Pre-press staff will filter your requirements through the prism of their experience, ensuring the printability and reproducibility of your brand artwork.
Pre-press Improves Value by Ensuring Brand Consistency
The pre-press team works closely with the designer and printer behind the scenes after that initial chat to set expectations. The prepress workflow may not be visible much, but the benefits it brings to the label printing process are substantial:
- The labeling procedure includes engineering for quality and consistency.
- Printing issues such as legibility, vignette banding, gaps between neighboring colors, etc., are avoided.
- The prepress department will optimize your label artwork to ensure that it will print as you and your designer had imagined it by considering the tolerances and constraints of the technology that will be utilized to print your labels.
- Using a spectrophotometer, a device that quantitatively analyzes the color, you may assess each printed label’s compliance with your brand’s numerically established color targets.
- Before plates are made, and your order is sent to press, your press proof will allow you to accurately see what the printed product will look like and make changes.
Advantage of Combining Prepress and Printing in one Location
Your label artwork must pass pre-press quality assurance checks to guarantee that it can be reproduced digitally or lexicographically, order after order. Essentially, it is the skill of making precise predictions. Additionally, it is simpler to make accurate projections when prepress and printing are housed under one roof. All the press setups and calibrations required to prepare artwork for a certain press effectively are available in the prepress section.
To provide the best press situation, they can confirm that the proper ink and press maintenance is being carried out. In addition, the overall lead time between initial contact and delivery is shortened due to the seamless transfer between graphics, proof approval, plate making, and printing.
Conclusion
In light of what has been said in this blog, we can thus predict that the Prepress service will continue to expand in the years to come. An operator of a digital print press uses software and digital printing equipment to produce products that meet client needs quickly. The easiest method to understand these concepts is to enroll in a reputable graphic design school that offers instruction in advanced-level prepress topics.
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