For those of you enjoying the life of a pre-press technician or production artist, there’s come at least one time when a print defect has been brought to your attention. Something seemly unavoidable, not a typo, but perhaps an unusual rendering of color, an overprint error that slipped under the radar, or a rogue photo that printed differently from all the rest.
If you haven’t already, ask your company to incorporate PitStop into your existing pre-press workflow. The rather simple application add-on to Adobe Acrobat will quickly identify out of gamut colors, un-imbedded typefaces, Overprint errors, and quickly identify native programs, rendering intent, and unwanted color management, plus a plethora of other potential dangers located within a file. It will also target the very element within the file that causes the issue, and give you an attempt to correct it, or send a report back to the client or art department for correction.
And for its rather low price point, it’s a must have for anyone in pre-press.
PitStop is great! When I worked in pre-press we got it on two computers, mine (offset) and the one in the digital print department.
The only issue I had is that it enabled designers to send bad files instead us of trying to educate them to correctly set up files. We got a bit of “it printed OK last time”. Yeah dude, we fixed it for you last time but if this going to be a regular thing, can you fix it your end?
I’ve found designers don’t want to be educated. Designers can go through pretty much their entire career now sending in bad files, because print vendors have pretty much built the file prep charge into their pricing. If anyone calls out the designer on their crap, the standard answer is, “well no one else has any problem with my files.”
Pitstop is an indispensable tool. I don’t like that it’s gone to a subscription model though. I don’t deal with enough PDFs to make it’s monthly fee a necessary option. Wide format printing is far better using native format and most of the designers we deal with get that. We are usually only doing one-offs too, so there aren’t pages and pages of content.