-
-
- What exactly does this involve? I am looking at some work that among other duties involves this, as it stands I don’t know anything about it. Could I read through a basic book and remember enough to get rolling or not?..
~
- What exactly does this involve? I am looking at some work that among other duties involves this, as it stands I don’t know anything about it. Could I read through a basic book and remember enough to get rolling or not?..
-
Need more specifics. Could mean anything from creating the artwork, to troubleshooting it, that is making sure all the fonts are there, colors are separated (pms, spot, CYMK), files are prepared properly; bleed, trapping, photos are there, photos are the correct DPI…etc.
I think I’m gonna move this - it seems pretty straightforward to me.
Moved from IMHO to GQ.
Well, in the twenty years I spent in the prepress trade, I did everything from setting and proofreading type, pasting up mechanicals, shooting line copy and halftones, doing one- two- and three-color stripping and platemaking.
When I moved to a color shop, I did more halftones and veloxes, and was one of the last people in New York City to learn the fine art of camera color seperation. Later I was a drum scanner operator, also making color seperations.
Basically everything that happens to make a printed piece before the actual printing is prepress. People who do Photoshop and Quark are in prepress, for example.
Not the sort of thing you could read about and fake your way through. I left the trade in 1996 (though I went back briefly in 2000-01) and there’s no way I could keep up with the business today. My work these days as a professional photographer in the digital world is dizzying enough.
What, no 4/c stripping? Pussy. 
postcards is right – it’s not the kind of work you pick up from a book. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s much like a graphic equivalent to copyediting: making sure that all the various pieces and parts are assembled correctly and in the right format for the next step, in this case the press. Shame that the hand work has pretty much given way to being just another computer job. It requires as much attention to detail, but I miss the toys (rubylith, ooh pretty) and the eye-hand coordination I used in doing it the “old-fashioned” way. So does Mr. S – he was in the biz for 20 years (about 15 of it in stripping), while I had only 5 years of web stripping. But I spent some time as a night shift crewleader and so got to learn camera and scanner work, proofing (Dylux and Matchprint), plating, QC, stepping, compositing, hand flatting (at that time we had an Opti-Copy imposer camera that could be used to lay out an entire flat on one piece of film, so hand flatting was already rare), 4/c and some sheet stripping, and all kinds of fun stuff. I miss the work, if not the job.
If you want to read a book to get an idea of what it is and see what it involves, try a Pocket Pal, it’s put out by International Paper. Look it up on Amazon or Alibris.
If you’re already in the printing industry, someone at your company should already have a copy. At the company I work for, if you become a Customer Service rep, they send you to each Dept. for a week to learn the basics of printing. A few years ago one of our CS reps went into PrePress 'cause he liked it so much.