Attending a Press Check

Not all jobs warrant a press check. If all the intermediate proofs have been satisfactory, and the job doesn't involve exotic stock or ink effects, there's no need for the printer to invite a customer to sign off on a live press run. However, there are numerous reasons for holding a press check: There may be concerns about printing on challenging stock, or there may be a desire to ensure the successful outcome of a high-profile job such as an annual report. Don't be intimidated by the atmosphere of a press check. The roar and bustle of a pressroom can be overwhelming, but just take a deep breatha good whiff of all those solvents may have a calming effect.

Note that since printing plants often run around the clock, a press check may be held at any hour of the day or night. The print service provider will attempt to give you an idea of the time, but problems with other jobs may change the schedule for your job. You may find yourself camping out at the printer or waiting for a call.

During a press check, these are the things you should watch for:

• Accuracy. Make sure the press sheet matches the approved intermediate proofs (page proofs and bluelines). Check images, text, content, and color.

• Ink on paper. Watch for flaws in registration, color, and ink coverage. Look for smearing, and watch small details for distortion. Small text (especially white text reversed out of multiple colors) may close up. Look for color consistency in elements that are repeated on separate pages. Check that crossover art matches from page to pageyou may need to fold up printed sheets to lay the pages side by side to check the match.

  Minor adjustments can be made on press, but major problemssuch as the need for a second hit of a solid color or the creation of a rich blackwill require pulling the job off press, reworking some portion of it, replating, and going through makeready again.

• Stock behavior. Watch for flaking or picking (small fibers of paper breaking off after printing, leaving unprinted areas), especially with heavily textured stock. Watch for wrinkling in thin stock. Check for showthrough from the other side of the sheet. To some extent, the pressman can compensate for stock behavior, but if the stock proves unwieldy, you may have to reconsider your choice of paper. Such a drastic change will result in the job being pulled off press. New stock will have to be located (or ordered), and your job will have to be rescheduled. An ink draw-down sample might have established that the inks would look satisfactory when applied to the stock manually, but the combined effects of multiple ink impressions over large areas of the paper and the mechanical actions of paper being pulled through the press may result in unexpected results when the job is actually printed.

• Debris and scratches. Keep an eye out for hickeyssmall white halos in solid color areas that are caused by a foreign particle stuck to the plate or blanket. Hickeys are fairly easily fixed by wiping the particle away. Watch for scratches in text or large areas of color coverage.

While the prospect of stopping a press and juggling the complexities of corrections and rescheduling may seem distasteful, the costs incurred at this stage may still pale in comparison to the expense of completely reprinting a job if the printed outcome is not satisfactory to your own customer.

At each step of the process, through your design stages and the successive proofing stages at the print service provider, there are multiple opportunities for things to go awry.

While you're focused on kerning an important headline on the cover, it's easy for you to overlook a typographical error on the last page of the publication. While a harried prepress operator at the printer is replacing an image with a color-corrected version, he might err in positioning the new image.

Tiny errors can lead to expensive problems. Tunnel vision is unavoidable, especially in complex projects. That's why proofing is so important. It's also helpful to solicit input from someone who hasn't been staring at the job as long as you have. An innocent bystander can often spot errors you've missed: "Hey, this looks great, but shouldn't there be a picture in this big empty white box?"