WORKFLOW: Golf, Prepress & Adobe CS3

Golf might act as truth serum, or perhaps it was the beer cart that brought their insights to the surface. Whatever the cause, I was fascinated by a recent exchange between the president of a web offset printing company and his largest client, a publisher with more than a dozen titles. We were at the Printing Industries of Wisconsin's annual golf outing when I asked about the prepress department.

“Prepress? We don't do that anymore,” the owner laughed. “That's his job!” He pointed at the publisher and smiled. “The stuff comes in, we throw it at the workflow system and the plates come out.” His client agreed, but noted how much things had changed over the years.

“I just recently found an old $10,000 invoice for typesetting,” he recalled, “and that was just for one issue!” He then revealed how print has managed to remain so viable in a world full of electronic media.

“My costs to publish a 50,000-circulation magazine have dropped to less than half of what they were a decade ago,” the publisher said. He attributes his efficiency to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and the bulletproof PDF/X-1a variation, in particular. Unlike TIFF-IT, the print industry's previous attempt to improve blind file exchanges, his designers can create PDF/X files without special hardware or special software.

Adobe Creative Suite, with version 3 launched in April and the Master Collection (left) shipping last month, has never been more powerful or efficient. As my golfing friends noted, it's taken prepress out of the printshop and moved it upstream to the content creator. While the accompanying reduction in prepress staffing may not be welcomed by some workers, the resulting efficiency helps the printing industry further profitability.

Dozens of minor interface improvements have made the suite more consistent and, therefore, easier to use, while more functions can be automated through scripting or Adobe's built-in automation tools. Photoshop's new non-destructive Smart Filters, Quick Selection Tool and the accompanying Refine Edge dialog box are all welcome additions to this powerhouse application. But my vote for the most potent new Photoshop feature goes to the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) input filter, version 4.1. Enhanced sharpening adjustments and more effective noise reduction are but a few of the reasons why everyone should be using ACR to adjust their images.

InDesign and Illustrator have both received additions that will benefit prepress workflows. Worthy of special note are Illustrator's greatly improved Live Trace controls and InDesign's new ability to load multiple items with a single “Place” command. Surprisingly, very little notice has been given to an enormously important change within these two essential print production applications: applying a transparency effect to overlapping spot and process colors no longer renders everything as CMYK. Spot color elements retain their integrity, and the whole process behaves as it should, though you'll need Acrobat's “Overprint Preview” turned on to view the transparency effect within a PDF.

CS3's “killer app,” moreover, has yet to gain prominence in the prepress department. Bridge, an image management tool as easy to use as iPhoto, offers entry into a powerful new world of metadata tagging and searching. Assets tagged with descriptive metadata hold that information within InDesign, Illustrator and even the resulting PDFs (so long as they are created through “Export” or “Save As” rather than by distilling a PostScript file).

The addition of Macromedia's Flash and Dreamweaver tools alone would have justified a full version upgrade for the Creative Suite. But Adobe packed in a plethora of print-oriented features that will further streamline our production processes.