This is the document that we will be looking for mistakes within. We have been told that the document is allowed up to 5 Inks to be printed.
Mistakes
- Tree Silhouette image is missing from the links. To solve this we would have to make sure that all of the images are in the folder where the links are from. In this case, the file has been misplaced. It's very important to make sure that we keep the links and Indesign will bring this to attention along the way. The links palette also contains all the information you need and any missing image will have the red hexagon with a '!' mark letting us know. If you double click on the question mark, you can then navigate to find the missing image.
When you select an image in Indesign, in the new CS6 version, you can easily see if there is a link symbol or missing link on the actual image which makes it easier.
- PANTONE 341 C GREEN and PANTONE 7426 C RED are being shown in the separations and swatch palette but not being used in the publication. This means we have to delete these colours in order to clean out our palette because the consequence of leaving this could be that unnesacery separations are outputted which could give us more expensive costs. The information about the number of inks can be made apparent when sent to the printer but if the operator is careless they might just send them out so it's better to keep tidy and better safe then sorry - Minimising the mistakes that other could possibly make. To remove them, just simply remove them from the swatches palette. It's useful to check through for spot colours before you save the final one for print.
- This image of the bird is only 15.8% of it's original size and needs to be saved to actual size before bringing them into Indesign or else problems will be caused. It's okay to bring larger images into indesign and then scale them smaller but when doing this, I will have to go back into photoshop later and change the image size to the final correct size I have chosen which you will beable to know from the scale size in Indeisign. In this case, the image is 15.8% which can be altered easily in photoshop to get the actual size.
- Bottom image on the double page spread is only 72DPI and it should be at least 300DPI to maintain the quality of the image. The 'Link Info' section of the Links palette will tell us this and show up when each image is selected. To resolve this, we will have to find the original high resolution file of the image. This may mean getting in touch with the customer to maintain the correct format. We can change the image to 300 DPI, but this will not make the quality of the image better, it just adds unnesacery pixels, it just makes the image blurry with more pixels.
- One image is RGB colour mode and all of them need to be CMYK in order to work in the colour mode of the Indesign document. To change this, I would have to open the image in photoshop and pull the colours back into the CMYK gamut or let photoshop do the work by converting the file to CMYK.
- Colours need to be extended to the bleed line.
- Registration colour has been applied to the text at the bottom of the page instead of black which is an easy mistake to make but this will cause problems when printing by causing the 'Ink Limit' to be exceeded. The text at the bottom of the page is red when looking into 'Ink Limit' which means it might smudge or bleed because there is too much ink overlaid on top of each other. The ink limit has been exceeded by 300%. To fix this, we just need to reapply the correct colour of black.
- One of the swatches that has been created is an RGB swatch. To change this, I can just double click the swatch and change it over to the CMYK swatch rather than RGB and because the swatch is global, everything that is this colour in the document will be changed to the new colour.
Exporting for Print
We can check in our pre-flight mode if we have any errors before printing. To do this we select 'Pre-Flight Panel' at the bottom of the screen to bring up this box. Here we see that one of the images is missing which is something that would have to be sorted out before print.
If I go to File>Package, I can maintain all the information that is needed to keep all the files together ready for print. It tells us how many inks needed to print which is 4 processed inks and one spot ink and also if there are any RGB images that shouldn't be there. The amount of fonts being used and their availability. If I had a missing font then I could then exchange the font by going over to 'Find Font' and choosing another appropriate similar font. I also get the opportunity to re-link files here.
Once we have checked that we can then click 'Package' which will then make me save my document before bringing all the files needed together for this publication. I can name the file here and also add some instructions for the printer if needed then save and package the file up.
You get this warning sign up which is about fonts. There used to be a grey area where the printers had to buy the fonts used in order to print them but if you own the fonts then this is fine, so we click ok.
the Indesign file is then packaged so when we look in the folder there is a copy of the Indesign file, the fonts used and all of the image files as well as instruction which is useful for when sending the document off to be printed of transporting your document to print yourself.
There is also another way to save the document which is as a .PDF file. Some printers will only accept this option because a lot of them do not use Indesign. An advantage of this is that the content is not editable and you don't have to worry about storing the files or fonts.
To export as a PDF you can go to File>Export and in here there are some Pre-sets. The easiest thing to do is to use the pre-sets.
I shouldn't have to change any of the exporting settings on pre-set but the option is there if I want to customise the outcome of my PDF. If the document is large then this may take some time. I can check how long this is taking by opening up the background tasks palette. And this is also useful to see any errors that have occurred and which page that there might be a problem with.
Here is the image of my final PDF. As you can see, the missing image has given us a really low resolution image of the tree silhouette and also knocked out any colour that was behind that and is now just a white box.
You can download from blurb a pre-set which allows you design for their exact print templates and this may be the case for printers too, making it easier to get exact templates for you to work in.
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