Process Control Part I

Fujifilm CTP Platesetter, Photographed by me, on Pentax K1000 and scanned from color negative.

This subject is of more import if you are a Printer or Prepress Professional than a Graphic Designer, but if you design for print you need to know about it, especially if you're in a position to view color proofs or press sheets for approval.

I think I mentioned somewhere that I got hired into the prepress trade in a German owned Prepress House (Haus?) that was dedicated to process control like no place I have seen since. At the time this was unremarkable to me: having no other experience in prepress I assumed it was just a part of the job. Certainly the German management made no fuss about it, nor did they walk around talking about "process control." In fact, I cannot recall ever even hearing such a term or anything about the importance of it. They just did it. And every phase of every department was marked by it.

I was not able to appreciate that fact until after I had taken a job at a large corporate owned American prepress house. For example, this shop had one, and only one, grimy set of System Brunner's 'Brunner Control Strips' for each of the two proofing systems they used (3M Matchprint and DuPont Cromalin). This was deemed adequate, though, as that one set was seldom used, unless something "went wrong." The German shop, by way of contrast, had multiple sets of Brunner Strips available, which were kept clean and replaced regularly. Where the German shop changed exposures in the proofing dept constantly throughout the day to keep the readings on the Brunner Strips exactly where they were supposed to be, the American shop might change exposures once a day – if someone bothered to run the strips. The German shop required a correctly exposed Brunner strip on every proof with densitometer readings attached to verify it – and that's every single proof on the sheet, not every proofing sheet that might have four to eight or more proofs on it. The American shop expected that a strip would be run once every shift, but it often wasn't, and seldom was anything written down.

So I guess you could say that the American shop also did not walk around talking about "process control" or the importance of it, and that every phase of every department was marked by that as well.

As a side note, The Comparatively Small German Shop is still in business. The Large Corporately Owned American Shop with Massive Capital Resources has been out of business for quite a few years now.

For a long time I thought that this was just a part of A Tale of Two Prepress Houses. After I had more knowledge and experience though, I began to suspect that it was not coincidental that the German shop was so big on process control. I began to think that maybe it had something to do with the fact that they were German, that maybe Germany was the Land of Process Control and we Americans have just been rather slip-shod about the issue.

Some years after that I worked for a shop that used inkjet proofing – my first experience with that type of proof. "How consistent is this system?" I asked soon after starting work there. "Extremely consistent," was the reply. "How do you know?" I asked, not seeing any controls in place to demonstrate that. "Well, it just stays real consistent." I can tell you from experience that this particular inkjet proofer was very consistent, but we didn't find that out for sure until almost three years later! In the mean time we had no proper way to read and verify each particular proof, so there is no telling how many times things went haywire because of a bad proof. And this place had some of the most critical color I have ever seen.

Later at that same shop I had a similar discussion with the prepress manager about the fancy DTP Platemaker. That wasn't normally my area, so I wasn't too familiar with the protocol. As you might expect, I started asking questions to begin with because things had gone haywire. I wanted to nail down what were the known factors so we could look at the unknown. It turned out that they weren't reading the plates! There was a little scale you could read, and an excruciatingly expensive gizmo to read them with, but there were no readings. "How," the prepress manager asked me,"with this fancy so-and-so and these type of plates and all this various mumbo-jumbo is there going to be any drift on these plates?" After thinking about it, I had to admit that I had no real knowledge of the mumbo-jumbo, the nature of the plates, or the so-and-so, "...however, I can tell you that things change. Things go wrong. If you don't read these plates you don't know where they are. What if it's us and not the press after all?" I got more or less blown off that day, but guess what we later found out? The plates were wrong. Turns out after all that all the fancy stuff is still only as good as the vigilance of the guy running it.



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