Proof of Concept

Nowhere is the adage "time is money" more appropriate than when applied to the business of publishing. Publishers and printers are always on the lookout for faster, better, cheaper ways to speed the production workflow.Widely adopted technologies such as word processing, desktop publishing, digital photography and editing, accredited file formats, electronic file transfer, content management, and zero-make-ready presses all exist for one fundamental reason: to speed publishing production.Of all the points along the publishing workflow, one area remains doggedly resistant to time optimization: proofing. Publishing costs creep upward with every tick of the second hand as pages are being trafficked and proofed.Even with the wide availability and acceptance of digital files for soft proofing, artists, writers, editors, and printers continue to mark-up and traffic hard copies, including final contract proofs.This not only stretches the proofing phase by days or weeks. It also increases publishing costs for paper, ink, electrical, telephone, shipping, and prepress. Unfortunately, serious inadequacies of soft proofing solutions cause publishers and printers alike to continue their reliance on old fashioned hard copies. But now a new generation of digital proofing technologies, dubbed virtual proofing systems, promise to overcome the problems vexing soft proofing solutions.A collaborative, Web-based technology, virtual proofing lets editors, artists, publishers, printers, and advertisers review content in purely electronic format, while maintaining absolute color accuracy.Soft proofing has been around in one form or another since the mid-1980s. That's when desktop publishing became available to any publisher with an Apple Macintosh. Acceptance of soft proofing grew throughout the '90s, after Adobe Systems Inc. introduced its Portable Document Format (PDF).PDF files allowed publishers, advertisers, and printers to review final layouts on any PC, Mac, or Unix computer screen. This was a giant step forward for editors and artists accustomed to trafficking and squinting over hard copies. TROUBLE IN PDF PARADISEYet for all its obvious advantages and ongoing technological advancements, there are crucial elements of the proofing process that PDFs don't handle well. Color matching for art and photographs tops the list of problem areas. Adobe's PDF file format is ideal for gazing at layouts and text, but woefully inaccurate for examining color. In some situations, such as clothing and automobile advertisements, reader purchase decisions are dependent on perfectly accurate color reproduction. An advertiser selling a red lipstick, for example, had better not see fuchsia in their published advertisement.Clearly PDF files are a key enabler, making it possible for any publishing organization to do soft proofing or, at a minimum, send test prints to a laser printer or over e-mail. But for color checking, a hard proof remains essential in PDF-based shops.Digital obesity is another problem with PDF files. While e-mailing a proof is faster and cheaper than trafficking hard copies, the digital files can be tens or even hundreds of megabytes in size.Sending multi-megabyte files to a list of editors and artists can bog down corporate networks. It can also take hours for workers to download if they're using slow, dial-up Internet connections."The [graphic] files are too large," says Dan Caldwell, vice president of operations for Integrated Color Solutions Inc. (ICS), in Greenville, S.C. ICS offers the Remote Director virtual proofing product. "In office work, it's easy to collaborate in text, with tiny files in e-mail. With the publishing industry, where file sizes are hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes, it gets difficult to send images around." Robust virtual proofing solutions offer version control features lacking in PDFs. These let publishing teams track, manage, roll-back, or roll-forward changes to proofs. This prevents multiple proofs from confusing and slowing the production process.It also prevents the wrong proof from being approved, and lets publishers see who did what work over a project's life time.COLOR FASTMost important, virtual proofing systems make it easy for everyone involved in the publishing workflow to see the final print product with absolute color and layout accuracy—using nothing more than a simple Web browser.This means no more printing out proofs, spending a small fortune on FedEx to ship proofs around the globe for approval, or pushing fat files around on e-mail systems."Probably the best thing is what [virtual proofs] do to schedules," says Jim Smiddy, technical director for Blanks Color Imaging Inc., in Dallas. "We have the ability to show color to a customer four or five times in one day. Before, it took a week to 10 days to do that, because you're talking two days in couriers."Smiddy says Blanks averages 800 to 1,600 image proofs a month with one client alone. "When you talk about replacing that number of [hard] proofs with virtual proofs on screen, that's huge," he says. "Five years from now we won't be doing proofing through film."In addition to accelerating delivery times, printers say virtual proofing cuts the approval process down to hours, from a week or more. Better still, changes can be made right in front of editors, artists, and advertising clients. A final approved proof can be signed off in a few hours, and electronically (read: instantly) dispatched to the printer."One reason I fly so much is color management is so subjective," says Art Bush, director of color and technical sales support for Williamson Printing Corp., a printing services firm in Dallas. "Being able to see proofs under the same viewing conditions as your client allows you to see exactly what they are looking for."Williamson's clients, such as Saatchi & Saatchi, American Airlines, and Zales Jewelry, usually demand three rounds of color revision. That means three showings, and three proofings. Because most of the clients are out of state, the process entails three FedEx shipments to all interested parties, and the occasional overnight flight for Bush.Those three rounds of proofing used to take three to five days. Now it takes one day, using virtual proofing technology. Bush's organization uses the Remote Director virtual proofing product."We can show those three rounds of proofs the same day," Bush says. "We would pick up at least a minimum of three days, plus save [the cost of] at least three FedEx packages."Bush also says the constant back and forth when trafficking soft or hard proofs puts pressure on prepress services and printers. This forces publishers to ante up for lots of overtime, to keep things on schedule.Virtual proofing has allowed Williamson Printing to cut overtime dramatically, which is saving their clients money. "You can also produce a better product, more efficiently, on time," he says. "And when you can do more work, you can offer better volume pricing. It just snowballs."VIRTUAL TEAMWORKBeing able to see and approve ads and pages from anywhere on Earth is only part of the gain. The best virtual proofing systems allow all hands involved in the creative process to markup, annotate, and comment on the shared virtual page."People can make marks on a virtual proof like you would with a grease pencil on a hard proof," says Geoff Kolb, product manager for Matchprint Virtual Proof from Kodak Polychrome Graphics (KPG), in Norwalk, Conn. "So you can have everyone on the phone looking at the same image, make correction notes on it, and once you synchronize it, folks on the other end of the connection see the changes."This feature alone helps KPG clients across town or across continents go through five rounds of major revisions in as little as seven hours—a process that used to take a week or more, Kolb says.Speed isn't the only advantage. The quality of team collaboration also improves."There's time, there's money, and then there's just the hassle to get things done, which equals time and money," says Gary Pawlaczyk, VP of sales and marketing for Pictorial Offset, in Carlstadt, N.J. "Now publishers and advertisers and printers are looking at the proof together. It's a small community working efficiently and collaboratively."This is beneficial for projects on tight deadlines, or beyond deadline. Virtual proofing with online markup can help publishers, advertisers, and their printer partners push pages through in literally minutes."Say a customer has last minute changes, and the product has to be delivered tomorrow," says Christopher Eckelkamp, manager of technical services for Quebecor World, in Edison, N.J. "We upload the file, and in minutes the customer can see and approve the color of the page, and any changes. Virtual proofing can also be used as a fast and simple confirming proof, to say 'yes, we got your corrections, and here are the changes that we made.'"HARD COPIES NOT DEAD YETAt first blush, it appears virtual proofing could be the final nail in the coffin for hard copies. A recent TrendWatch Graphic Arts study reported demand for high-quality color proofs is down throughout the graphic communications industry.The last time hard proofs led the pack was 1999, when 33% of respondents said they preferred hard proofing. Use of hard proofs has been on the decline ever since.But don't count hard copies out just yet. TrendWatch found only 32% of corporate Internet departments, and a mere 20% of ad agencies, are using Adobe PDFs and Quark XPress for proofing, in conjunction with their printer partners.And a matchprint remains the #1 most popular proofing method among printers, with 33% of respondents reporting this as their preference. Adobe PDFs and Quark XPress files tied with digital halftone proofing for second place, with 25% of respondents casting their vote for this.For all its evident benefits, many publishers remain cautious about adopting virtual proofing. "There is an educational leap we need to help the market go through," says Yehuda Messinger, VP of the graphic arts division at Real Time Image. "Early adopters see the immediate value, but when you go to the mass market, the graphic arts market is fairly conservative."Amen to that, says Smiddy of Blanks Color Imaging. "Part of the problem with virtual proofing is getting people to change the way they do business," he says. "It's a paradigm shift, because people are used to having a proof in their hands. Forget the fact that it's better. Forget the fact that it's faster. They've been doing hard copies for years, and they don't want to change."Vendors of virtual proofing solutions remain undaunted. They've seen technophobia before and, ultimately, the better technology prevails. That's led to a hot and competitive market, with several major players. Real Time Image inaugurated the market when it released RealTimeProof in 2000. The product allows multiple participants to view printed material and examine the color integrity in real time.Users view and work with actual production files in their Web browser, without conversion or compression. This means there are no artifacts or lost data, according to company officials.Kodak Polychrome Graphics' Matchprint Virtual is built on RTI's offering. KPG added a color integrity component, so CMYK color displayed on the screen exactly matches what will be printed.ICS's Remote Director competes with RTI's and KPG's products. Like its rivals, ICS's Remote Director focuses on color accuracy and verifying pre-press proof color, when viewed by several parties simultaneously over an Internet connection.To make it easier on people with remote or slow connections, Remote Director can also transmit files in segments. This lets collaborators examine only the areas they want to see, without requiring them to wait for an entire graphic file to be sent down the wire.Creo Inc., Burnaby, British Columbia, has also joined the virtual proofing fray. Creo offers Synapse Insight, a virtual proofing product with a full complement of collaborative and version control features. It also provides the ability to zoom in on color and text for detailed inspections.Group Logic Inc., of Arlington, Va., sells Imagexpo. In addition to the standard list of virtual proofing features, Imagexpo includes an on-screen densitometer to verify RGB and CMYK color values.Lastly, there's On Time Proof from Lucid Dream Software Inc., in Hoffman Estates, Ill. It works with Heidelberg's Delta workstations as a stand-alone tool, or integrated with RTI's software.SIMILAR YET DIFFERENTAll of the major entrants in the race to make virtual proofing the standard offer similar features, including Web-based viewing, online markup and collaboration, and version control.Color management is one area where the leading virtual proofing vendors diverge: RTI supports zooming in to take a closer look, providing users with numeric color values. It works, it's accurate, and it's ugly, some publishers say. KPG and ICS take a friendlier route, leveraging recent advances in LCD monitors."LCD technology is getting there for high fidelity color," says Peyton Kay, VP of sales and marketing for ICS. "You still need a software package to control [color,] and insure and verify color accuracy, but it works."KPG executives agree that ICC color profiles, and advances in monitor technology, make color displayed on monitors more accurate than they have been. "When you blow up [an image] eight or 16 times, all you get are large squares," says KPG's Kolb. "You get lost in a sea of pixels. And when you make [numerical] measurements of colors, they don't look anything alike when you print them out. So we had to make [ICC] models for how monitor color aligns or does not align with printer color." Some printers who offer Real Time Image as an application service beg to disagree. They prefer RTI's numeric color matching approach, and say on-screen proofing requires the latest LCD monitors to work properly—something most publishers don't own yet."The technology [for on-screen color correction] isn't widespread yet," says Pawlaczyk of Pictorial Offset. "The rules of engagement [are], each monitor has to have a certain resolution, and be less than a year old. Remote users might be on a laptop, at home, at work, at an advertiser's or client's site. It's a big issue, similar to the lighting in a room."And for all it's benefits, virtual proofing is not a panacea, says Eckelkamp of Quebecor World. Printers still produce a traditional hard copy proof for plant use, and during the final print run.Eckelkamp also suggests virtual proofs are best for short documents. "I don't think they should be used for a 1,000-page [project]," he says. "Would you rather look at 1,000 pages on the screen or on paper? It's subjective, and gets down to how comfortable you are with on-screen proofing. But we wouldn't recommend going past a dozen pages."- Andy Patrizio

Publishing News

Proof of Concept

Publishing Executive Staff

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Publishing Executive Staff