Soft Proofing Technology Enters New Market (1)

Soft proofing technology has experienced many twists and turns since its birth and development. Although it was initially favored only by newspaper and magazine publishers, it has now broken the limits and extended its reach into new markets.

We can see the development trend of soft proofing technology from the printing management company HH Associates. Just two years ago, the company was unable to provide this service to customers. Now, 30%-40% of them are using soft proofing, and this proportion is still growing. Kevin Dunckley, Technical Services Manager at HH Associates, said: “A lot of our customers now require the use of soft proofing. And in the procurement and marketing process, this technology has also been recognized.”

Dunckley predicts that in the coming year, the company will have 70%-80% of customers choose soft proofing, and nothing can stop the promotion of this technology in the customer base, now they just need time to show customers the soft proofing technology. Benefits and teach them how to use this system.

accuracy
Soft-skinning is not a completely new technology. Products like RealTimeProof have been around for a decade, but many companies still use "point-to-point" processing methods such as sending PDF files by e-mail. Although this method can give users more flexibility and save more time and cost, it will also let users lose one of the most important aspects, that is, proofing control.

Dunckley said: "When I came to HH, I saw that many PDF files were being sent via electronic files. Not only they did not have an audit trail, but they were mostly stuck in the firewall because the attachments to these emails were too large. The soft proofing system, on the other hand, can bring more traceability and transparency to production. Locking around the email is not an ideal way of production."

Steve Emerson, a prepress and digital distributor of TPI, said: "The biggest benefit of soft proofing is often overlooked by everyone, that is, it can be integrated with any business system."

This is crucial for those laws and regulations as they need to attract the attention of many people.

For example, one of Steve Emerson's customers once integrated the Dalim Dialogue system with his studio system to use it to complete job scheduling, planning, and budgeting. In addition, they also tried to implement a soft proofing system. Integrate into marketing resource management system to maximize work efficiency.

In order to meet the different needs of customers, HH installed two sets of soft proofing systems. One is a PDF-based Hhub system, which is more suitable for dealing with more text-based jobs and another Dalim Dialogue system that is good at handling colors.

Although rich control features increase the attractiveness of soft proofing systems to customers, for many applications, people are most concerned with color. Some people think that a monitor alone cannot display the full ISO Coated color gamut, but Eizo and Samsung's latest monitors can do this, and their deviations are smaller than hard copy proofs.

The color expert Targetcolour's Malcolm MacKenzie gave us an example. He said that one customer had tried ICS Remote Director (ICS paperless remote proofing system) in three different factories. The results showed that: If soft proofing can Using hard-copy proofs in combination, they can significantly increase the accuracy of printed colors (errors drop from +/-3dE to +/-0.5dE). This means that the maximum error between colors printed at different factories will drop from 6 dE to 1 dE.

MacKenzie believes that with the continuous advancement of display technology, soft proofing will also be a tradition, expanding from the newspaper and magazine printing fields to other fields, including packaging.

It is understood that the latest monitors not only provide you with spot color proofing, but also real-time display of spot color corrections.