We have a file that was submitted by a customer,
but there were some problems encountered when it was preflighted.
So, now I'm going to fix those problems because the customer has given us
the okay to repair it rather than sending it back to them for repair.
So let's take a look at what's wrong with this picture.
I've been told that there is a graphic that's missing, but
the customer sent a replacement file so we should be okay.
And they used a font that they usually
don't use, so we're going to have to fix that as well.
So, let's fix those two problems and then
we'll start looking for some more subtle issues.
First to fix the missing graphic.
InDesign makes it pretty obvious that big red
stop sign tells me that's the missing graphic.
So let's take a look at it, now I can
do that by either clicking on the blue underscored page number,
or I can click on Go to link, either one takes
me to the spot in the document where it's used and
then highlights it by showing me the edge of the image.
So I'm going to replace this by coming back
over the links and clicking on the Relink button.
There's a new file and I want to make
sure that there's nothing substantially different about it, that
it's the correct picture, it hasn't been resized
or the color altered significantly, no that looks good.
But, I am going to double check one more thing.
And here we go.
The effective res is nearly 1200.
Is that an issue?
Certainly the opposite would be an issue if the resolution was too low.
If you have a document with a lot of very high res images that
are scaled down, in other words big
images, but they're placed at a reduced size.
Sometimes that can slow the processing when this is sent to the
imaging device, such as a plate setter, or even just to the proofer.
So, to speed things up, I'm going to go
into Photoshop and lower the resolution on this.
It'll still have
plenty of pixels, but it'll just process a little bit faster.
Now, I can do this several different ways.
In the links panel, I can click on the little pencil icon for edit original.
Or, my favorite method is just to hold down
Option or Alt, and double click on the image.
It opens up immediately in Photoshop and I'm just going to reduce the file size.
30% ought to do it, so we'll have plenty of pixels.
But it'll process much faster.
Now, when I save this file, I don't have to do
anything back in InDesign, because I embarked on this from within InDesign.
Notice that it's updated it automatically.
Now, let's go on to the missing font issue.
So up to Type and find Font, and
when I find the first one, they've used, Chaparral
Pro Semibold but, they've actually changed their corporate approach
and they're really using just plain old Chaparral Pro.
So to replace that, just come down here,
and this is a nice thing that InDesign does.
It remembers your frequently used fonts, or most recently
used fonts, and that saves me a little time.
So I'm going to change that.
And in fact I happen to know that it's okay to change all.
Alright, so that's good. Let's see if there's some other issues.
Now scrolling back up to the first spread, I'm going to zoom out a little bit.
And I want to check to make sure that there's bleed.
Now they saved this file while they were in preview mode and if
you'll notice at the bottom, my tool panel, it's still in preview mode.
So that sort of sticks with the document.
When I go back to normal mode,
my suspicions are confirmed there is no bleed.
So first of all, I'm going to set up an official bleed zone
by going to File > Document Setup, clicking on Bleed and Slug.
I can just hit my up arrow twice in the bleed field,
there's my eighth of an inch.
And now I can see for sure I'm missing some material here, I need some bleed.
So I'm going to go around and pull handles here on some of these little
frames and hope that I have enough image material to fill out that bleed.
Looking good so far.
Let's see how we are on the cover. That's good.
Now, the cover is actually a blue frame, it's just a frame that has a color in it.
The, flowers are actually
silhouetted, so I need to make sure that I have enough flower left over, and I don't.
They've positioned the edge of the flower image right at the edge of the page.
But I've been told it's okay for me to
move it over, just to give myself enough bleed.
So I'm just using my arrow keys, and there we go.
So, that's enough, we'll be fine.
Now, any time I see something silhouetted like this,
I want to make sure that that shows in its entirety.
Yep, they were cropped off a little bit.
And I notice here they have misspelled the company name.
So, I'm going to select this text frame, double click to
switch to my type tool, and fix that little typo there.
So some of this stuff can be caught by a program like Flight Check.
Some of it you really have to look for.
So that's one of the things that happens in prepress.
Somebody with a practiced eye takes a look at a file and, based on experiences
they've had, either with similar jobs or with a
particular customer, they kind of know what to look for.
Now, here's something that always catches my eye.
When you see a large black area, this job is printing on
an offset press and just printing black ink by itself won't be enough.
So, I want to see what's going on here.
I can select this and I can go to my
swatches panel and I can see that it's using only black.
So, just to double check, I'm going to go to Window>Output and
choose Separations Preview.
Turn on Separations Preview and if I turn
off the black, we'll see that there's nothing there.
Why, why is that an issue?
Well, in a large area, like that black ink alone looks a little bit anemic.
So what we traditionally do in prepress, if it's running
on an offset press is we replace that with a
rich black, now if it's running on a digital press,
that's actually unnecessary, but since I know this is running
offset, I know what to do.
So, I'm going to come over here to my swatches panel, and I'm
going to make a new color swatch, which I'm going to call Rich Black.
Now, the recipes for Rich Black vary from shop to shop.
But what we use is 60, 40, 40 and the reason for the different
numbers there, that actually results in a fairly neutral under color if you will,
and then of course, my 100% black.
So, it doesn't look substantially different on screen, but now
I know that this is going to use a ridge black.
I know that it's going to print a much more robust black coverage.
So, it won't look a bit more grey and anemic.
So, just to double check, back to Window and Output, back to Separations Preview.
Turn that on.
There we go. So that's going to print much better.
Now, is there anything else going on? I fixed my bleed.
My Rich Black.
Now there's sort of an opposite thing that can happen.
When you have shadows, little drop shadows, under elements in a document.
You don't want them to be four color,
because they might shift in color on press.
They might go a little pink, or blue, or green.
So any time I see a drop shadow, I'm a little suspicious of that as well.
So I can use my Output and Separations Preview to check this.
Another thing to know about Separations Preview, when you choose that, it
automatically puts everything at high resolution display, which is kind of nice.
So keep an eye on this little shadow here.
If it were built correctly, when I turn off the black the shadow should go away.
Uh-huh, but it doesn't.
So that's my hint that they've created a four color
shadow, and that's going to look a little bit odd on press.
It's better to control if it's black only.
So over in Effects, I'm going to
go down here to fx and change the settings for the Drop Shadow.
So, oh, they had made an RGB choice and,
that looks like black, but it renders as four colors.
So I'm going to switch back to swatches just to be safe.
Choose just the black click OK.
And I can check this gain by going
back to my Window and Output, the Separations Preview.
When I turn off the black, the shadow
goes away.
And if I want to double check, I can
turn off everything but the black and there we go.
All right, so that's good.
I know that that's going to behave alright on press.
But there might be some other subtler things that
are hard to find just by, you know, visual inspection.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to load a preflight profile.
Down here at the bottom, this is always a nice
thing to see that little green light so there is errors.
A quick way to get to
preflight profiles is to double click right on
that little area that wakes up the preflight panel.
Now, there's a built in basic preflight profile that InDesign uses by default.
But we have a custom profile. So I want to invoke that.
So, in the preflight panel menu, I'm just going to choose, define profiles.
And then, here at the bottom, I'm going to load my profile.
So, here's my preflight profile.
You can see the file extension, IDPP, InDesign preflight profile.
And, just launching it doesn't really make it work.
So, I'm going to choose OK, but then I have to invoke it.
So, preflight profile. There we go.
No more happy green light.
I have four errors. Let's see what they are.
So, it says that I have registration color applied.
Hm, let's find out where that is.
And again, InDesign makes it easy by giving me this
little hyper-linked page number.
This text that just looked like it was black.
Somebody's used Registration instead.
So, let's fix that and go to the Swatches Panel.
I almost wish Registration didn't show up in the Swatches Panel.
It's often selected by accident when someone means to choose black.
And what would Registration do?
Well, we would end up with the 100% all four colors.
Cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
.
And that would cause some problems on press.
And it's just not the right thing to do. Good, I've fixed one error.
Now, I have some image resolution issues on my cover.
Let's see. So what's my resolution?
Well, let's find out what this preflight profile's looking for.
So back to define profiles.
And for images and objects, image resolution there's a threshold, so it's
got to be at least 275 and it shouldn't be over 450.
And again that's about
having adequate information but not overloading the image device so.
Let's see what's true of this when I go to links.
We can see that this is oh, very low resolution.
So since it's the cover image we might have to
have a conversation with the customer about how to handle this.
Now, I can go into Photoshop and I can increase the resolution a little bit.
And Photoshop does a pretty good job of trying to interpolate.
But again I am asking it to make something out of nothing.
So this, I'm going to have to double check with the customer.
I'll do an experiment.
I'll increase the resolution in Photoshop.
We'll see how it looks. That may solve the problem.
But for now, I'm going to have to just wait on that.
Let's see what's wrong with this other image.
So this is a little low as well but, honestly that's not going to be a problem.
273, it's still pretty good.
Now if it were 72, then we'd ask for a replacement image.
Let's see what this other one is.
It's, again, about 270. That's still actually pretty good.
We just set that threshold and we want something at
least 275, really just so we can catch problem files.
So I have two that I think I'm going to let go but for
that cover image, that I'm going to have to talk to the customer about.
But at least I've fixed most of the problems with this file.
I'll save it and we'll wait to hear back from the customer after
I do some experiments with that cover image and see if we can
make it a little bit better or determine maybe it isn't a problem after all.
So this sort of repair work is really
pretty common, this happens in lot of prepress
departments, rather than sending the file back to
the customer for repair which might impair the schedule.
This stuff can be fixed right in the prepress department by somebody who
knows what they're doing and understands what's
required for this job to print sucessfully