Team Impression - Day 2

Today the office was extremely busy and everyone was up to their eyeballs in work. This meant that I needed to keep my head down a little bit and not get in peoples way. I spend the day putting together a 20 page portfolio book of some of the work I have photographed which hopefully we're going to take onto the digital presses tomorrow! While I didn't to interact with people that much as they were so busy, I did spend the day with my eyes and ears open and still felt like I took in a lot of information about how the repro department works as well as some tricks and print methods I was previously unaware of.

I firstly learned about rich blacks. This is a technique where with large areas of black on a job, process colours are mixed into the black swatch to create a nicer dark rich black. For digital jobs you use 20% cyan, magenta and yellow with the black and on the litho presses you use 30%.

I learned about sealant. A lot of the time, a sealant is applied to the whole job to seal in the colours and to make the print more durable and better with folding. Sometimes though areas need to be left unsealed. This can be when more data needs to be printed onto sections at a later date by different people, or when sections need to be left black so they can be written on with a pen. To do this the repro guys put together a digital mask which is sent to the press almost like a silk screen, and it tells the press where to and not to lay down sealant.

While I was laying out my book I also had a closer look at Smartstream to see if I could further my understanding. I made some diagrams of how the different impositions work and it definitely made me understand clearer. The first big different between jobs is the way paper is handled. Jobs can either be work and turn, work and tumble sheet work. Work and turn and tumble is where the front and back of something is being printed, but to save on plates, the front and back are printed of the left and right, or top and bottom of the page, so when it is flipped, the corresponding front or back also gets printed. The different between turn and tumble is the way that the paper is flipped, and this depends on the dimension on the job and how it fits best on the page. Sheet work is where there is more designs that just a front and back, for instance in a book with lots of spreads.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll be down at the digital presses, but it depends on how busy everyone is.