All About Pre Press And Its Importance

With the expansion of commercialization, printing press industry has also seen significant technical development. The process of printing is now more extensive and intensified to deliver the best service. Printing is divided into three major phases – pre press, press and post press. Pres press is the initial phase, which sets the basic platform for other phases. Let us discover what pre press is actually and how it is done.

As the name suggests, it is printing term that entails that a document must go through a process before it is taken to printing level. Basically, pre press term is linked with the making of plates or stencils used in the printing phase. However, in elaborated term it is expressed as the process of preparing a document to be ready for print in any environment, like through a laser or other digital printing format.

Although, the process or phases followed for prepress vary from company to company, but usually almost all of them follow some of the major steps, such as editing, proofreading, layout, scanning and color separation. Fewer companies separate the task of layout and other graphical work tasks from pre press and consider them as the part of a graphic designing. Prepress also involves conversion of any digital files into a usable format for the printing company. Distilling a document into Adobe PDF (portable document format) is one its example.

As said earlier, the prepress process is elaborated. Before the actual document is sent for pre press, the document is developed by an author, graphic designer or any other creative professionals. Before the professionals examine the document, it passes through several stages that are as follows:rn1.) Checking out for errors in the spelling or typingrn2.) Ensuring that all images and other graphics elements are in a appropriate formatrn3.) Dividing the colors into two or four for printing on a color pressrn4.) Proofreading that all fontsrn5.) Ensuring that all the layout guidelines are being followed such as paper size and margins

When all the above validation checks is over, the document is finally, sent for document editing and is considered ready for printing press. The next step is creating the printing plate and its proof as a copy to be used. The prepress staffs check the proof documents and if they find it satisfactory, they send the document for printing.

The pre press has really come a long way. Involvement of technical aspects sometimes makes this work to be done by the graphic design department and they succeed in doing it well.