Print Buying Direct

We’ve been so busy with enquiries for our wallet folders (presentation folders) that we just aren’t going to get them all produced in January. So we have taken a decision today to extend our offer until the end of February 2009.

So if you haven’t come across our wallet folders (presentation folders) before (or indeed perhaps this is the first time you have found Print Buying Direct), here is a summary of what we are offering.

• They are designed to hold A4 Documents (eg Leaflets, Flyers, Brochures)
• They are printed in full colour to the outer side only
• They are printed onto a 350gsm Silk Board
• They have what we call an Interlocking Pocket (no glue)
• ONLY £199 for 100 folders

Print Buying Direct is one of the Uk’s leading suppliers of design and print, based in Cheshire (UK) but supplying all of the UK & Ireland.

Don’t forget to place your order soon – if you need to know any more then just call 0870 950 8444 or email info@printbuyingdirect.co.uk

Please feel free to browse our print buying website and use it as a useful tool – we are adding new pages and offers every week. So keep popping back or subscribe to our printing blog.

For all the rationalisation, mergers and acquisitions that have taken place, the demand for print has largely remained in line with GDP (Gross Domestic Product). As GDP has risen, so has the volume of print but how the printing pie has been cut up and the number of mouths getting what could be considered a fair share has perhaps dropped.

The next couple of years many economists are suggesting we may see some of the toughest trading conditions seen since the late 1970s, but economists are invariably wrong and it is fair bet that they will be wrong for attributing tough trading conditions in the printing industry on the economy. Trading conditions are certain to become turbulent; how can there be stability when several manufacturers introduce presses, including long perfectors, into the marketplace capable of changing all their plates in a little over a couple of minutes, carrying out make-readies in 10 minutes or less? And to boot, web-fed digital presses producing 1800 A4s per minute.

There is another element that is certain to bring instability to our industry that has little to do with economic forces. Customer expectations are changing in a rather profound way. One of the most significant effects of the digital age is the influence on customer expectations. No, not the speed at which they expect to get the job, though that is given, it is their quality expectations; printing from the Internet has meant a huge change in perceptions of quality, strength of design and overall appearance.

Much of today’s print is related to supplying information; brochures, reports, products leaflets, general information and this is delivered usually via an office printer using 11 and 12 point sans serif type printed on white 90gsm laser type paper. The result is more than adequate, with colour where appropriate printed at 600 and 1200dpi. What we are seeing is a fundamental change in our expectations of what is appropriate. Just as wearing a tie in important meetings can seem outmoded and stuffy- print is facing a similar change, with what is ‘fit for purpose’ the new driving force. Certainly collar and tie printing will always have its place, but the situation will arise more often where a superbly produced 16 page brochure in six colours with multiple matt and spot UV overprints will look aggressive and inappropriate. You have been warned.

For more information on Press Technology or printing in general please don’t hesitate to contact us at The Printing House (Print Buying Direct)

Although many designers still work manually, most illustrations, photographs and graphics are created and edited using digital tools. Software such as Photoshop or Illustrator, digital capture with a scanner or digital camera, all allow us to create and manipulate graphics digitally. However, there are many ways of publishing graphics so digital images need to be prepared in different ways. The requirements for resolution and overall image quality can differ quite substantially, and images are processed again when plates are made, or when screening is applied to data for output on a digital press. Depending on the image content, operators have to consider what dot shape to use for the screen dots, and whether to use stochastic screening in order to avoid moiré.

Density

For reproduction in a digital workflow, photographic originals, colour negatives and transparencies, have to be digitised using a high end scanner, either drum or flatbed. Desktop flatbed scanners are really only suitable for scanning reflective photos, where the results are not likely to suffer the rigours of subsequent for print. When screening transparencies, it’s important to use a scanner with sufficient resolution to achieve fine detailed and sharp images. Transparencies have a higher density than reflective images.

Digital images

Scanners used to be important for digital image processing, but they are now largely redundant because of the increase use of digital cameras. High-end digital cameras now have enough resolution and image quality to capture images that can be used in a professional prepress workflow. With resolutions of 10MP (mega pixels) or more in the image sensor, even midrange digital cameras produce good enough images for many publishing scenarios. High-end professional’s digital cameras offer even higher image quality, and even surpass what can be achieved when scanning transparencies on a drum scanner. When processing digital photos the challenge is to maintain both shadow details and highlights when processing the raw data from the camera. This ensures that the colour and grey balance are correct and although the camera’s built in software does a decent job for most situations; advanced image processing is often needed to achieve high and consistent image quality. This is especially true for print output. One of the most popular image editing software packages is, of course, Adobe Photoshop, but it takes a long time to learn and master the more advanced functions.

Five major considerations

If every single image has to be analysed and processed manually there are five main areas to consider.

1. decide if the original image has enough resolution for the publishing process to be used, so that all details will appear sharp and correctly rendered.
2. it’s important that the image is rendered with smooth tone transitions, both in the shadow details, in the midtones, and in the highlights.
3. There should be no tendency to banding or loss of fine details.
4. Good overall contrast is key to ensuring that the image has depth, and the colours should be accurate and as bright as possible, rendered with the correct hue.
5. Last but not least; the grey balance needs to be checked. If an image has a colour cast in what should be neutral grey areas (or light and near white areas), the whole image will look strange.

RGB to CMYK

Digital cameras and scanners capture images in RGB, so before converting images into the CMYK colour space for printing, they need to be optimised. On a calibrated monitor a balance in the RGB values, for example a setting of 127 red, 127 green and 127 blue, should produce a mid-grey neutral tone on the monitor, and so in the image.

Compression

Image processing involves many variables. One of the trickiest for many operators is knowing when and how to apply compression: too much compromises image quality, too little means unnecessarily fat files that can slow down production. A popular technology for reducing image file size is JPEG, but although it’s popular, JPEG is actually a lossy compression technology, so JPEG compressed images will always lose some data, and therefore, quality. Advanced digital photographers prefer to use TIFF on their original photos, because it also can compress images but it is not as lossy as JPEG.

For more information on image processing or printing in general please don’t hesitate to contact us at The Printing House (Print Buying Direct)

Ever since we started to handle colour images on mainstream computers, colour management of some sort has been a necessary evil. Although one would think it ought to be getting easier by now, there is still room for improvement. The rising number of digital devices in the workflow means that we are dealing with devices such as digital cameras, scanners and monitors that work with emitted light, describing colours in RGB (red, green and blue), but printing them by manipulating reflected light using cyan, magenta and yellow inks. To these primary colours we add black, the key which together with CMY creates the illusion of the other colours we can see.

ICC

Modern colour management largely depends on technologies developed by the ICC (International Colour Consortium), which bridge the worlds of RGB and CMYK using a larger colour space to describe colours, in combination with device profiles. Every device, whatever it is, represents colours uniquely. Different monitor brands and models have slightly different colour fitters and in practice this means that a given colour expressed in RGB values, creates slightly different colours. Black described in RGB has values of zero for each channel because no light is emitted for red, green or blue filtered phosphor guns. Conversely white is created with full signal strength on all channels, encoded as 255, 255, 255 when using 8 bit data per channel for 256 level of grey per colour channel.

Calibration and characterisation with ICC profiles

In order ensure that two different monitors display colours in as similar was way as possible, they need first to be calibrated and then characterised using a colorimeter or spectrophotometer. The second stage, characterisation, refers to the creation of a unique ICC profile for an individual monitor, describing the colours it produces for different RGB-values. The ICC profile comprises a table of RGB values and the colours expressed as a corresponding series of CIElab values. CIElab is the universal colour language, used not only within the graphic arts, but in the most situations where exact colours need to be described.

Calibrating monitors

When calibrating a monitor it’s important to set brightness and white point. Images should then look the same when displayed on a monitor, as when the reproduced image is viewed in a viewing booth. In print publishing, the reference white point is 5000 K (Kelvin), a warm white light which is a compromise between even warmer looking indoor light from bulbs or fluorescent tubes, and slightly colder (bluish) outdoor daylight. The white point of average outdoor daylight is around 6500 K. this is often the reference white in photography, but not in print. The viewing booth at an offset press is set to 5000 K, so if we want to preview an image as it will appear in print, this is the white point we need to use. The brightness level also needs to be matched and in a viewing booth this is between 1500-2500 lux, which is quite an intense light. For a monitor this is equivalent to a brightness setting of around 120 Candela per square meter (cd/m2). Obviously there are challenges when trying to preview images on a monitor, and match the appearance of the printed version, but it can be done. Perhaps not on any cheap monitor, but at least on high end CRT and LCD monitor rs.

Calibrating printers and presses

Colour printers and printing presses are slightly more cumbersome to calibrate than monitors or scanners. The first step is to linearise the printer or printing press. This is basically to make sure that for example 40% cyan really comes out as 40% when printed on paper. On a colour printer this is fairly straightforward to accomplish, assuming you have a function for linearisation in the RIP software.

For conventional printing presses, matters are slightly more complicated, since we have to factor in different dot gain levels for different types of paper stock. Another thing to bear in mind is the ink that will be used. Even thought the ink manufacturer should comply with the ISO standard for ink, in reality individual batches may need to be checked with a spectrophotometer. When correct dot gain values are compensated for in the platesetter, a reference test chart can be printed, and the ICC profile for this press and paper calculated.

Once all devices in the digital imaging process are calibrated and characterised and ICC profiles have been created, colours can be converted back and forth depending on the need and the publishing scenario. This could mean creating a softproof on the monitor, or hardcopy proof on a colour printer. Using this methodology also simplifies the automatic conversions from one print method to another using the advanced functions in modern RIP systems.

When to convert RGB to CMYK

The decision to use a particular paper stock or printing press is often made very late, so is it wise not to perform colour conversions until in the very last minute, since paper and print obviously influence colour. The unconstrained workflow is generally referred to as an RGB workflow. Images are placed as RGB in layout software, and PDF files are created with an assumed output profile embedded, but the actual images remain described using RGB values. By applying the correct output profile in the RIP at the output stage, we minimise the number of colour conversions in the workflow, and ensure that the correct ICC profile is used, taking into account the paper stock and print method used. The layout software, be it InDesign or Xpress, can preview the images even if they are in RGB, by temporarily applying a specific ICC output profile. Adobe Acrobat can also do this for previewing PDF files on screen prior to output.

Spectrophotometer

If properly controlled, a modern, ICC colour managed workflow offers predictability and good image quality, as well as workflow flexibility and tools for production automation. The key is to have the right measuring tools in order to both calibrate and characterise the devices involved. In order to measure total ink density and dot gain you can use a densitometer, but a modern spectrophotometer has this function and does more besides. To calibrate a monitor you need at least a colorimeter, or better, a spectrophotometer and in order to check CTP plates, and linearise the platesetter, you need a spotmeter, because a densitometer can’t accurately read plates.

All modern press control systems use spectrophotometers at the press in order to check that prints really do match the required quality level. The shorthand used to describe colour accuracy is Delta E (∆E), a value that indicates the colour difference from a certain target, expressed in CIElab, and what you actually achieve. A value of ∆E 1 is impossible for humans to differentiate, so we cannot perceive any colour difference and value of ∆E 2 means that the colour difference is just barely noticeable. Depending on the paper stock used the printing method, for most printers an average ∆E value of 4 is considered an acceptable match for quality offset production. For good quality control throughout the print run, the ∆E variation should be monitored and the data saved for later analysis

No-one should claim that colour management is easy to implement, nor to maintain. However, with proper training and using the correct hardware and software it can be done successfully.

For more information on colour management or printing in general please don’t hesitate to contact us at The Printing House (Print Buying Direct)

Adobe’s Portable Document Format, was never designed for high-end graphics art production. Back in the early nineties, when it was first introduced, it was intended for cross platform office document sharing. But the graphic arts industry embraced PDF as a means of transporting content files from point to point, and PDF’s role as the foundation for print media workflows was rapidly confirmed throughout the industry. We should bare this in mind when considering PDF as the preferred file format for print production. There are good reasons for using PDF, but not all PDF files are suitable for output for quality printing.

PDF has become a de facto standard for graphic arts workflows because of its convenience, ubiquity and flexibility. The alternative to using PDF files as the basis for print production is to use either native files, meaning documents saved in the internal file format for the layout software, such as InDesign, Quark Xpress or perhaps Illustrator. We could also export the page content as postscript. But neither approach is ideal and there are benefits and drawbacks with both.

Application files

The problem with sending native files from a designer to a printer or prepress department is that the receiver needs to have the same software installed on their computer in order to be able to open the file. And that software needs to be the exact same version, and ideally running on the same type of computer platform, with the same version of the operating system. As if this want irritating and costly enough, all fonts and possible hyphenation and language modules need also to be in place and of the exact same version, as on the designer’s workstation.

Most layout software doesn’t embed images inside the page document, which is yet another source of possible errors. Instead they have pointers to the high resolution versions of images, which are generally stored somewhere else. This could be on the computer used to originate the file, or on an image server. Working with native files requires all of these variables to be taken into account, for the files to flow through production without mishap. Missing images or missing fonts, or both, are among the most frequent errors in prepress troubleshooting. These are all reason to work with PDF, where all file components from images to colours can be contained within a single file. It’s clear that PDF has mostly replaced Postscript as the preferred page description language. PDF files are easier to work with and less cumbersome to handle in print production than native layout document files from InDesign or Quark X Press. Preparing documents for print will perhaps never be childsplay, but using PDF files in general, preflighted and well prepared PDF/X files in particular, is the path to better, more secure file processing.

For more information on providing us with PDF files please don’t hesitate to contact us at The Printing House (Print Buying Direct)

There are as many technologies for proofing as there are types of proofing, for proofing means many things to many people. It all depends on where one sits in the workflow and why the proof is required. Much content proofing can be done either with hard copy printed proofs or on screen. Increasingly such proofing options are available throughout the workflow, right up to contract proofing.

In the early stages of the proofing process, in most cases the need for absolutely colour accurate proofs is minimal. Preliminary proofing tends to focus on getting the content right and checking that the correct images are paired with the right captions, names are spelt properly and there are no widows and orphans on the pages. However, even at the early stages of creation and production content originators and designers should still strive to make the correct colour choices. Often he or she wants to match a certain tone in an image with other design elements, or match several images on the page or spread so that they have the same brightness, contrast or colour tone. This is why the widespread assumption that a monitor used for layout doesn’t need to be colour accurate is a misconception. Colour accuracy early in the workflow is an important part of quality control, and an aid to accurate production proofing later on.

Softly softly (Soft Proofing)

Whatever its purpose, most proofing starts on screen. Colour accurate screen-based proofing requires a good quality monitor, which is unavoidably expensive and that is properly calibrated. Also, a standard office fluorescence light tube doesn’t have the correct spectral wavelength distribution to accurately simulate daylight (D50 or D65), so here, too, colours wont be correctly represented.

Hard and fast

For most preliminary hard copy content proofing, or for layout proofs, pretty much any colour printer will do. If you want a device that renders colours close to their appearance in print you have a couple of options. Laser colour printers are fast, but they are not always particularly colour accurate. High-end inkjet printers are slower, but they can produce very high image quality and colour accuracy, as long as they are driven by a dedicated proofing RIP. The RIP is crucial to accurate hardcopy proofing because a colour printer on it’s own won’t necessarily offer colour management functions. In fact, many inkjet printers don’t even have a RIP, relying on a simple printer driver for a colour output that is in likely to be sufficiently accurate for professional applications. Such a device may be good enough for office applications or content proofing, but it will never do for colour accurate print production proofing.

Print media proofing and contract proofs places much higher demands on the proofing system. You may want the proofs to be on the exact same paper stock as the final print; or perhaps you want the screening to be exactly the same in the proofs as it will be in the final print. In case there is a risk of moiré patterning in the final output? If you need to know precisely what your datafile will produce on press, you need to produce proofs using dedicated proofing technologies. The majority of contract proofs are created using high-end inkjet based proofing printers.

For more information on proofs and proofing please don’t hesitate to contact us at The Printing House (Print Buying Direct)

At Print Buying Direct we have been producing property detail sheets, letterheads and Wallet Folders (presentation folders) in vast quantities for Letting Agents.

So we thought we would put together a package of Special Discounts for Letting Agents to enable them to purchase cheap Printing & Design. To help launch this offer we have built a special webpage for letting agents show details of the very competitive pricing.

The items we have highlighted as being especially fast moving for this market sector is Wallet Folders (Presentation Folders), property detail sheets and letterheads.

For more information on the offers please visit our dedicated webpage.

Print Buying Direct (The Printing House) – Crewe, Cheshire, UK

Pre-press is one of the areas of greatest change in the printing industry, and to the benefit of the environment. The adoption of computer to plate technology (CTP) has reduced chemical consumption, film usage and the related impacts of their manufacture and disposal.

Further opportunities for reducing environmental impact lie in the hands of pre-press departments. Digital Workflows (Heidelberg Prinect/Printready at The Printing House), have not only reduced the requirements for film and chemicals, but also for transport.

Although Soft Proofing isn’t accepted by everyone, in colour managed workflows (we work to FOGRA standards) operating to standard printing conditions there is no reason why not. A great deal of electricity, ink, chemical and paper, not to mention time and money, can be wasted trying to match a proof made without proper controls. But colour managed workflows with appropriate calibration from the beginning of the chain (the customer) through to the press set the job off on the right track without the need for chasing colour on press.

For full information on our environmental policies please see our website Print Buying Direct

Information courtesy of Print Buying Direct (The Printing House) – Crewe, Cheshire, UK

See www.printbuyingdirect.co.uk for details of our great wallet folder promotion (presentation folders)