A month ago Kodak sent out a press release about their new Nexpress printing press. This press has a very nifty feature that has not been seen before in the printing world. It’s a digital press that lays down what they call “Dimensional Clear Dry Ink”. It’s a special coating – like varnish, or gloss – that creates a raised printing surface to the printed piece.
It’s a 3d effect that you can feel with your fingers, which makes it unlike anything done before. Imagine a photo of an orange. With this new Nexpress and the Intelligent Dimensional Coating Solution, you can actually “feel” the dimples of the orange on the paper. If you hold the paper at an angle, you can see how the light reflects as if it were bouncing off a dimpled surface.
Recently, I wrote about our catalog project that required the usage of multiple metallic, spot color inks. It took some trial and error, but we got things set up correctly to do the workflow and the PDFs turned out ok.
At least so we thought! The printer has been working on processing our files the last couple of weeks and discovered a situation with one section of the catalog that was causing a problem. There were about ten, seemingly random pages in this section that were not separating correctly. They were all created in the same exact fashion with the same exact settings so it was very strange to hear this.
After we heard about the problem, I went to our workstations and verified all the settings just to be sure nothing had accidentally been flipped. But no, everything looked as expected. Nothing amiss anywhere. The settings in Quark were fine as were the settings in Distiller.
Piggybacking on the multi-color PDFs we were generating for our last Intrigue project, there was a new challenge awaiting. Our latest catalog has a specification for 2 extra “colors” as well – though they are not actually colors, rather they are extra “plates”.
There will be a spot varnish plate as well as a “glossy” plate. By printing with both varnish and glossy coatings, the product images will really pop out from the printed page. It creates a very high-end look and people see the extra quality immediately.
We were successful in generating proper (and standard compliant) PDFs for the previous book, this time around, we need to approach things a little differently. Because the varnish and gloss plates are not actual colors, it’s necessary to convince Quark and Photoshop that we will be using colors anyway.
We’re working on a very interesting project here at Intrigue. It’s a 160 plus page catalog for one of our high-end clients. The design of the layout is very clean and attractive. One of the most notable features of this project is the specification of six colors. That’s right, SIX!
It’s not unusual for us to do a project that specs an extra color or two. They tend to be a little more challenging to produce as we are very creative in how we add the extra color. In this case, our two extra “spot” colors are actually metallic inks. This will give the photos some extra “pop” in the printed book. Whenever we’ve done metallics in the past, people really love seeing the printed piece as metallic inks give a nice reflective sheen on the paper.
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few months, you are very much aware of the financial turmoil affecting every corner of the globe. It seems like every day there is breaking news of another economic disaster somewhere or talk of some well-known organization folding up its tent – usually the ones that had previously been viewed as being impervious to financial difficulties. Either that, or major league frauds are being revealed on a constant basis. The list keeps growing. None of it is pretty. It’s going from bad to worse to…
This is a topic that is a periodic thorn in my side – solving printing issues. At Intrigue, we do a lot of color laser proofs in-house so we can check our layouts. Seeing it onscreen and seeing it on paper are very different experiences. Whether verifying the color or graphics, there’s always something about seeing the design on paper that is more appealing than viewing it onscreen. And it makes proofreading a bit easier as well.
However, if you print as much or as often as we do, inevitably problems will occur. It’s just the nature of printing – something will get out of whack over time. It’s just a matter of what the problem is and how serious it is to fix.
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