What is prepress?
Short answer
Prepress is the work between receiving artwork and starting production: checking that the file meets the technical requirements of the process it is going into, correcting it where necessary, and producing an output file the press, cutter or RIP can run.
What the work actually consists of
Prepress covers file inspection, colour management, imposition, trapping where needed, and output. In a modern shop the largest part of it is inspection and correction: confirming page geometry and trim, checking bleed, resolving colour spaces against the output profile, measuring effective image resolution, confirming fonts are embedded, and deciding what to do about transparency and overprint.
- Geometry: page size, trim box, bleed box, orientation
- Colour: colour spaces, output profile, spot colour definitions
- Images: effective resolution at final size, compression, colour depth
- Text: font embedding, minimum sizes, overprint on small type
- Output: PDF standard, flattening, separations where required
Why it takes so long
Almost none of that time is spent on difficult problems. It is spent working out which of the same familiar problems this file has, and explaining it to a customer who does not use the vocabulary. The genuinely difficult cases — where a decision affects how the job looks — are a small share of the work and are buried in the routine.
File received 09:12 · first check 09:40 Customer emailed 09:52 · reply 14:20 Second file 14:22 · re-checked 14:35 Approved for production 14:41
Prepress and preflight are not the same thing
Preflight is one step inside prepress: comparing a file against a set of requirements and reporting where it does not meet them. Prepress is the whole activity, including deciding what to do about each finding and producing the output. Software that only preflights hands you a list; the work of resolving the list is still manual.
How Prepta handles it
Prepta automates the inspection and the corrections that have one correct answer for your workflow, and leaves the judgement calls to your operators. The result is a validated production file plus a record of every change, rather than a report to work through by hand.