Preparing Artwork for Print-Certificate Programme                        

Date	Trainer	Venue	Duration	Member  Price	Non Member  Price
19/02/2011	Griffith College Dublin	Griffith College	3 Days	€500	€750

Objective:

The course will provide a comprehensive overview of the technologies and principles around prepress and   premedia. It will also identify some of the pitfalls associated with bringing a project to print in a timely and cost effective manner.

 

Who should attend this course?

This programme is designed for people working in printing but wanting a more in-depth knowledge of prepress and the printing process.  It is designed for print professionals who want to know more about digital processes; design professionals where printing issues are costing money and web designers who want to understand print better.

A basic understanding of image editing software such as Photoshop, Corel Draw, GIMP. Some page layout software experience such as Quark Xpress, InDesign is necessary. You should be comfortable using either Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX.

Previous problems relating to printing artwork are a distinct advantage.
 

Travel details to the venue/parking:

What do you need to bring with you?

Nothing.

This course will cover:

This 3 day certificate programme in prepress / preMedia strategies course will combine knowledge of digital media, (as a basis for going forward) as well as analog media principles (the basics i.e., ink on paper, colour transmission and reflectance). It will teach users how best to implement tried and tested methods of getting on-screen results to reproduce faithfully in either an analog or digital environment. Whilst prePress is primarily a workflow for getting ink onto paper the preMedia side will help with repurpose the same message to a broader audience using digital mediums such as the web or other smart devices that will give a user access to the web. It will also expose the users to the creation process for content such as magazines, flyers, newspapers etc.

All of the principles on the course will be supported through practical examples and case studies.

Topics:

The following topics will be covered and where possible additional request topics can be included based upon the requirements of the class.

 

Project workflow:

·      Design

·      Prepress

·      Proofing

·      Reprographics and printing

·      Large Format Printing Lithography, prepress and printing plates

·      Lithographic plates

·      Film and computer to plate (CTP) technology

·      Camera ready copy (CRC)

·      LPI, DPI, screen angles and moiré

·      Dot gain and paper absorbency

·      CMYK, Spot colour separations

·      Registration, trapping, spread, choke, bleed, slug, creep

·      Pantone.

·      Colour matching and standards

·      Varnish and spot varnish

 

Imposition, sections and optimised paper usage:

·      Single or multi-page documents

·      Facing pages

·      Finished size vs production size

·      Imposition and grip

·      Quark or InDesign for imposition

·

Finishing:

·      Perfect binding, saddle stitch,

·      Die cutting

·      Lamination


 

Choose your platform

·      Why the mac?

·      Rise of the PC

·      Open source vs proprietary

·      The growth of an operating system


Crossing the platform threshold

 
·      File naming conventions.

·      Storage and retrieval systems

·      Media types and capacities
 

Application software

·      Adobe Creative Suite

·      Quark Xpress

·      Font Agent Pro and Suitcase

·      Nero, Toast and utilities Page description languages

·      Raster Image Processor

·      Platesetters and Imagesetters

·      Postscript and Page Description Languages

·      HP PCL and Adobe Postscript

·      Printer drivers and printer descriptions (PPD)

·      Postscript Levels 1,2,3

·       Postscripting files from applications


The portable document format

·      Encapsulation

·      Defining standards, PDF-X

·      EPS embedding

·      Font subsets

·      To flatten or not to flatten

·      Font compatibility

·      Transparency

·      Separations and spot colours

·      Manually rastering images

·      Distilling vs application output


 

All about type

·      Dissection of font parts. Ligatures, x-height

·      Control of typographic behavior. Leading, tracking

·      Families and descendents. Serif, slab, sans

·      Special characters. Dingbats, expert sets

·      Font technologies. Screen, printer, MM, TT, OTF

·      Font management software. Suitcase, Font Agent

·       Making new typefaces


Working with fonts

·      Embedding, encapsulation and PDF

·      Outlining and complexity reduction

·      Substitution and dealing with problems
 

The digital image

·      From pixels to dots

·      Raster image matrix

·      Vector image calculations

·      Resolution

·      Thumbnails, proxies and previews

·      Lossy and lossless compression

·      File format packages

·      Portability


Acquiring originals

·      Scanning, descreening and optical resolution

·      Digital cameras, CCD’s, camera raw and jpeg


Colour
 
·      Additive and subtractive models

·      Ink, toner and pixels

·      RGB, CMYK, greyscale, line art and continuous tone

·      Gamuts

·      Calibration and colour profiles

·      Duotones, spot colours and rich blacks

·      International printing standards


Preflight inspection

·      InDesign and the preflight function

·      Flightcheck


Additional technical topics

·      Image and PDF Optimisation

·      How to supply your files to your printer

·      Reducing the margins for error