A few years ago, soft proofing rose over the horizon as a potential transformational technology for printers. It promised speedy, remote paperless proofing.
The facts, it seems, have not followed the forecasts. There are clear signs that remote proofing is on the backburner for many printers. One major heatset web printer essentially abandoned plans to introduce soft proofing last year, much to the chagrin of the pre-press vendor, which assumed a sale was in the bag. That’s not to say the technology is redundant – it is thought that Hannanprint’s high-tech supersite in Warwick Farm is geared up for virtual colour proofing.
But it was always ambitious to hope that electronic proofing could become a universal proofing regime to sign off colour as well as content. Electronic proofing for colour, in its full conception, required an electronic proof to emulate the printed final product. Most vendors shied away from recommending that procedure. The fine print below the asterisk next to ‘soft proofing’ almost always recommended signing off on a hard proof as the contract proof. It made sense – after all, a halftone proof would always be a closer match to the print order than a screen proof, no matter how finely matched the display calibrations between transmitter and receiver.
Proving arduous
Those printers that did undertake a move to full electronic proofing have invested in beautiful, expensive monitors (think Eizo or Quato), introduced pain-staking process control with scheduled calibration regimes and set up intricately matched viewing areas with synced light levels. Even then, there was the issue of whether the presses had been finger-printed to emulate the proof. Printers are in the business of selling print, not proofs. By the late 2000s, premium soft proofing was proving arduous.
Emerging colour management processes that introduced process control from pre-press to pressroom have stolen a march on soft proofing. Among Australia’s leading print businesses, printing has very much become a manufacturing discipline, performed ‘by the numbers’, generating reliable, repeatable colour; an efficiently managed process, with the finished product springing no great, costly surprises for the stakeholders.
It is commonplace to find sheetfed litho presses with closed-loop colour, enabling densities to customer specs. In publication printing, heatset webs are fingerprinted to 3DAP Australian standards.
ISO-based colour management to the global ISO 12647-2 sheetfed profile is the norm. Off-the-shelf systems to help printer nail colour every time include Fujifilm’s XMF ColorPath and Esko’s Colour Engine.
There are even systems allowing cloud-based colour management, such as Pantone’s PantoneLive and GMG’s CoZone, Kayell’s Serendipity, Fujifilm’s XMF ColorPath Sync, and FFEI’s Real Pro Colour Cloud.
The upshot of all this predictability? It has defined more sharply what soft proofing excels at, namely, approvals. Content approval, via point-to-point communications such as email or specialised secure servers is flourishing, as content is a far easier proposition than colour for electronic sign-offs.
GMG’s CoZone is offered locally by Kayell Australia. Luke Wooldridge, sales & technical manager of Kayell Australia, which also offers Serendipity’s VeriPress, believes that while soft proofing can deliver and there are substantial cost savings in dodging hard proofs, several factors have slowed the uptake.
“There’s the large cultural change involved in changing the mindset of people who are so used to hard-copy proofs. The limitations of monitor sizes are off-putting to some printers. High-end, colour accurate monitors have a maximum size of 30 inches and some printers are concerned that using monitors smaller than the press sheet will make the colour matching process too slow, which would lead to increased waste.
“The implementation is initially costly, especially for companies with many printers or those who use large sheet sizes. As a result, many printers have found the concept of soft proofing too hard to ‘sell’ internally,” he adds.
Wooldridge does not believe colour management has made the hard proof an endangered species. “Most clients typically require a colour-accurate copy of the job, either hard or soft copy, before going to press. This has not changed with the introduction of standards-based printing.”
But Michael Smedley, business services and solutions group manager at Kodak Australasia, says he has seen a resurgence of soft proofing for colour, through products like Kodak’s Insite Pre-press Portal, and asserts it has outlived its “fad” perception.
Smedley believes soft proofing could become more widespread if more printers brought their customers into the tent. “The biggest problem is printing companies that may have invested in the technology are not letting end-print customers know about the benefits, thereby limiting the uptake.”
Pegasus Print Group, a 74-year-old company based in Blacktown, Sydney and running a pressroom that includes Heidelberg Speedmaster and Fuji Xerox presses along with wide-format EFI Rasteks and Vuteks, uses Fujifilm’s XMF Remote proofing workflow for remote content approval, with around half its work now remotely approved for content.
Pre-press & digital manager Joe Vassallo says soft proofing is the preferred method for work in which content approval is the main criterion, such as sheetfed publication offset, production digital and labels. Skipping a paper proof for colour sign-off also saves an estimated three hours to press time. But, as a rule, premium-quality work, such as photography magazines or intricate packaging work, where the colour is key, still require a hard proof. Publishers and agencies still call for press checks.
Conversely, some clients, no matter what the colour expectations, “are old-school and like to see a hardcopy proof”. And even on jobs that are colour-critical, some customers are more than prepared to calibrate for soft proofing and sign off on the colour remotely. These are a category which, as Vassallo says, “are happy with how we print, they know how we print, we know their files, and we’ve given them profiles to match to their monitors”.
With a move into point-of-sale work, Pegasus recently introduced the Fogra 39 ISO standard, and Vassallo says customers with properly, regularly calibrated screens tend not to place that much emphasis on a paper proof. Some clients and agencies might initially. “The first time we do remote proofing with a new customer, we send proofs out to them until they build a familiarity with the way we print and are confident we can match our proofs.”
The ISO effect
At CaxtonWeb in Sydney, which is currently being incorporated into Webstar, managing director Mike Shannon says colour management to ISO standards has signalled a steady decline in heatset clients seeking colour-correct proofs, hard or soft. The firm installed a Fujifilm XMF electronic proofing system for its Huntingwood facility in 2010, while Webstar runs Kodak Insite at Silverwater, but both companies have been operating these more for content approval of their magazine contracts than for colour correction.
“It’s a pretty controlled environment, printing to the ISO standards, and it works extremely effectively in the publications segment,” says Shannon, who also has a background in sheetfed and understands proof reliance on that side of the fence. “The ISO standards
are tight, but when you’re dealing with corporate colours or campaign work, it gets more sensitive.”
Steve Collyer, Fujifilm’s national product manager, graphic systems, says that while soft proofing is not out of favour and has become part of the norm, with printers and buyers adopting it as part of the everyday process, it is used more in the initial stages, especially for content approvals.
Collyer cautions printers to avoid patching together their own in-house soft proofing. “You can see it around the industry. Some will use PDF proofs, which is risky. These printers are cutting corners in the attempt to save costs, but the out-come may not match the expectation.”
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