As technology progresses, the need for traditional prepress services is dwindling. Most of the focus in the prepress industry is swinging towards digital prepress services.
The reasons why digital is often preferred to traditional include a consolidated workforce, lower costs, and faster turn around. The reason why the workforce is consolidated is that one person can do many of the tasks associated with prepress services. Whereas with tradition prepress, it might take a specialist to perform each task within the process. The skill-sets required for digital prepress often mesh right with graphic design, so many places simply use their graphic design team as their prepress team as well. This does not detract from the quality of the services, but enhances them because it’s less fingers in the pot when preparing a job to go to press.
As you might imagine, this consolidation results in a reduction of costs for both the service provider and, in turn, the customer. Digital prepress doesn’t just lower costs, but is becoming more cost effective because as technology advances, the equipment required for digital services continues to decrease. This, again, saves money for everyone, and makes digital prepress more accessible than it once was.
The process is also much less time consuming. Traditionally, everything is done manually, from graphic layout, to typesetting. With digital prepress just about everything is done on a computer, which makes things much easier to manipulate and change. Traditional prepress also requires the project to go through many hands, to a final proofreading stage. Due to the fact that so many people are involved in the process to begin with, this left a lot of potential points of error. The proofreading stage occurs after plates are cut and negatives are made. If errors are caught during this final proofreading stage, the revision process can often be very lengthy, depending on where the error occurred, because the final proof would have to go through many of the stages of the prepress process all over again, only to be proofread for any new potential errors. Imagine the frustration if an error was caught the second run through. Jobs might be at stake there. With digital prepress, as mentioned before, far fewer people are involved, so the potential for mistakes is reduced overall. Not to mention, with digital prepress, a proof copy is as simple to make as printing a copy out on a desktop printer. It can be checked for errors quickly and easily, and if an error is caught, it can be adjusted within a computer program much faster than the mechanical processes of traditional prepress services. This all occurs before the project gets to the stage of plate cutting, so it’s much less of a hassle to fix mistakes. What this means is a much faster turn around for projects using digital prepress services.
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