Process Control II

Fuji Platemaker; upside-down, inverted, out of register, and haywire because process controls were not diligently followed. Not pictured is customer, extreme right, walking away shaking head.

If you want to know that every plate is exactly where it is supposed to be you have to read the scale on every plate: not one in every set of plates (like the cyan plate from every 4C set for example), but every single plate! This might seem an awful lot of trouble to go through knowing that most of the plates will not have a problem, you do not read the plates for the sake of the plates that are correct! You read the plates for the sake of the ones that are wrong; because you cannot know that they are wrong unless you read them, and you need to read them because those are the ones that will jump up suddenly and bite you. Then when everything goes haywire the pressmen will be pointing at prepress, and prepress will be pointing at the press, and nobody will know if the proof is really good either because you don't have any readings on the proof.

Keep up that sloppy attitude and your shop might just go and join the The Large Corporately Owned American Shop with Massive Capital Resources (see Process Control I) in the Unemployment Line. Especially as the economy continues to shrink (and continue to shrink it will).

If you already have proper process controls in place make sure that you keep up with them religiously. If you don't have proper process controls in place and functioning earnestly, now is the time to do it. A good place to start is to learn as much as possible beforehand and then go to one of Dan Remaley's excellent conferences on color and process control, then have him follow up at your shop helping to set things up. If you do it, and you follow through with it, it will be worth every penny you invest.



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