A Tale of Woe

Okay, so I’ve been gone for a while, and I know I promised you a story about the recent design school graduate who doesn’t understand color separation, and you’ve all been very patient, but dammit people... I have a life to live! Anyway, here’s the tale of woe...

A couple of weeks back this guy comes into our shop with a laptop and tells us he’s been referred to us by another local printer who just can’t seem to work with his files. The boss and a customer service rep and I all sit down with him and he describes the job. He says it’s a two color piece, black and red; a 2-sided cover wrapped around a 4 page book, folded, stitched and inserted into an envelope. All black and red. He blazes through a lot of images on his laptop, and they do indeed look like a fairly simple 2 color job. We ask him what the trouble was with his last print shop, and he launches into a diatribe about how they kept asking him to change the files, and submit them at a ridiculously high resolution, and change the colors, etc., etc. And then he says those magic words that send a chill down the spine of every printer: “I went to design school, I know what I’m doing.”

This is where I should’ve kept asking questions, but I didn’t, because I was in the middle of outputting plates, designing some other client’s piece, and burning and labeling 300 DVD’s, all at the same time.

The boss says to him “you built all these documents in Adobe, right?”, and the kid replies in the affirmative. This is where I should’ve asked “Adobe WHAT?”, because Adobe makes a lot of software products, and some of them are just not the right place to build a document, but I didn’t. The platesetter was beeping, and I wanted to get back to it. The boss says to me “We can handle that, right? Adobe PhotoShop?” and I say “Well, we can open it, but is it a flattened file or did you save it as layers?” The kid assures me that all the layers are saved. Again, I should’ve asked “Are the black and red on DIFFERENT layers?”, but I didn’t. The hopper on the DVD duplicator was about to go empty, and I wanted to get those DVD’s burned by the end of the day.

So the kid leaves his files, the job gets written up, and I get my hands on the files the next day. Oh my god. Those files were a not-so-hot mess.

First off, there were two versions of every file... one in CMYK and one in RGB. No worries on the black; I can just ignore the RGB files (why the HELL would anyone send an RGB file to a printshop?!?), and convert all the black from the CMYK file to 100% black (C=0, M=0, Y=0, K=100). But the red? Now that’s a problem. There’s no way to make a PhotoShop document hang onto a specific Pantone number, so we have to guess at the red. Oh well; the client will have to approve a proof of the job, so we can use that opportunity to find a red that he likes. But separating the colors? Oh brother. The files were indeed in layers, as promised, but not in any way that might be useful. There were a zillion different layers, and almost every one of them included both black and red. Now I have to save two copies of each file, remove all the red from one and all the black from the other, flatten them and convert them to grayscale images, lay them over top of each other in InDesign, and then apply a specific Pantone spot color to the “red” file.

But that’s not all. These pieces are supposed to bleed off all four sides of the page, and he built them “to size”, so there’s no extra image for the bleed. So BEFORE I can separate the colors, I have to add a quarter of an inch to the canvas size in PhotoShop and fill in the extra space with the paintbrush and rubber stamp tools. This would be ridiculous enough if it were just solid color bleeding off the edges, but it’s more complicated than that. You know those curlicue/decorative-vine/Mike Tyson face tattoo embellishments everyone’s been overusing for a couple of years now? Yeah, that’s right... he used those all over the place.

I fix his bleeds, separate his colors, re-combine them in InDesign (designated as a spot red trapping to the black), and I’m still not done. It turns out there are still more of those decorative swirls that need to be applied as a varnish coat, so that part of the black has to be separated and placed on another layer in InDesign, so it will output as a separate plate that doesn’t trap to anything or knock out the black.

Basically I spent most of a day tearing this client’s artwork to pieces and rebuilding it just to get it to the point where I could start trying to plate it. He doesn’t understand how color works on a printing press. He doesn’t understand that PhotoShop is for photos and InDesign is for designing a finished piece. He doesn’t even realize that he needs to pick a pantone color if he wants a specific spot color. But don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine. He went to design school, and he knows what he’s doing. I, on the other hand, didn’t go to design school, so I have to sit in a windowless room and fix his mistakes.

I’m gonna go drink beer now and try to figure out which one of us is the idiot.