Preparation for Color Separation

In recent times, I have received several pieces of “finished art” supplied by clients where the sales representative has informed me that the printed material must be “on-brand” according to the client’s style guides. That should be the end of the story, but upon checking the finished art, it is clear that the artwork has not met the client’s own style guides, or been thoroughly checked by the client prior to submission.

One of two things will now happen – the prepress department can either fix the artwork without disturbing the client in order to fulfil the brief and expedite the work, or we can contact the client informing them of the situation and THEN ask whether we can fix it or have resupplied artwork that is color correct. Considering that the client may receive their proof and resupply the artwork in its entirety, this means fixing the colors again.

For years, I’ve been an advocate of receiving finished artwork that is correct for the following reasons:

• The client has correct content;
• Eliminates the risk of human error in prepress from incorrect or unintentional manipulations during corrections;
• Prepress can output more work considering they are not spending time manipulating files that may only be replaced at a moment’s notice;
• My employer isn’t losing revenue on prepress time that usually is not passed onto clients by the sales representatives.

That said, I make sure to contact customers who have supplied finished art that is incorrect and outline the issue, giving them the opportunity to resolve the issue themselves or let us do it. It is at this stage where some customers have been willing to fix the artwork themselves, but cannot see the issue. When I ask them to check the separations preview panel, the answer is always the same – “where’s that?”. Because this is a panel that I use so often as a prepress operator, I often think to myself “are you kidding me?” but to be fair, there are many panels in InDesign that I don’t use such as the animations panel; and I would have no idea how to use either.

On that note, I have prepared a video on my Youtube channel on how to use the Separations Preview within Adobe InDesign and used it to highlight instances of color mismatches, issues with black ink, and when white overprints.

This is not the first time I’ve been on my soapbox about this before – (see this article). It also directly relates to:

• Color mismatches (see this article)
• Black overprint issues; (see this article)
• Spot color issues (see this article)