Imaging 12 - Fujifilm Graphic Systems

Due process: 

when will CTP 

go chemistryfree? 

Tint hints: 

managing 

colour in the 

real world 

Scan-do: 

how automatic 

can scanning 

really be? 

Issue 12 autumn 2002 

Business by wire: e-commerce options explained

2 

EDITORIAL Imaging 12 autumn 2002 

IN THIS ISSUE 

The Internet is back, and this time it means business. 

Since we last reported on what the World Wide Web 

means to those in the visual communications business in 

issue 8 (Spring 2000), we’ve seen the great dotcom bust 

compounded by the events of 11 September 2001. 

Confidence in the high tech sector may only be recovering 

slowly but we can now approach what the Internet 

has to offer in a more sober and realistic way. 

And it does have plenty to offer. In this issue we 

look at a range of issues that we broadly group under 

the theme ‘e-commerce’: Karen Charlesworth explains 

what to look out for as a buyer or a seller of repro and 

print services online; Simon Eccles discusses technologies 

that allow repro and print companies to receive 

and pre-flight job files online to streamline the job 

hand-off and approval processes; then Karen talks us 

through the benefits to both customer and printer of 

04 E-COMMERCE 

After the dotcom bust, what’s the 

state of the Internet for buying and 

selling print? Karen Charlesworth 

explains the options for online 

ordering in a sadder but wiser world 

Imaging 12 autumn 2002 

08 E-COMMERCE 

There’s a lot more to online services 

than just sending a file from A to B. 

Simon Eccles explains what else you 

might do to add value and build 

relationships that are more than just 

virtual 

12 E-COMMERCE 

Don’t leave those old jobs gathering 

digital dust on a hard drive 

somewhere – managing digital assets 

proactively is the way ahead in the 

commoditised print buying market, 

says Karen Charlesworth 

managing the image, text and page layout files after the 

job’s finished. 

These Internet-based services can not only extend 

the geographical reach of both buyers and sellers of 

those services but also add value to both sides of the 

relationship. As printing and repro are seen more and 

more as commodities by buyers, anything that streamlines 

the process, improves quality or reduces costs is 

going to be an attractive feature. 

On the input side, as scanners continue to get better 

and cheaper we thought it was time to take a look at 

two subjects that would interest designers, photographers 

and printers, namely how easy is professional 

quality scanning these days, and how do you actually 

do colour management? Michael Walker spoke to 

experts at Fujifilm to get the answers. 

Another development that should not only improve 

15 

WORKFLOW & BUSINESS 

MANAGEMENT 

Reliable digital contract proofing and 

output to almost any vendor’s 

equipment were the reasons why a 

Woolwich printer bought a Valiano 

Rampage workflow 

16 CTP 

Direct imaging of plates is one 

benefit of CTP. Doing away with the 

processing stage would be another. 

Simon Eccles reports on how far down 

the road to processless CTP we’ve 

actually come; fast CTP makes sense 

for Guildford book manufacturer

productivity but also have a positive environmental 

effect is the arrival of processless CTP plates. Simon 

Eccles reports how we are progressing towards a 

chemistry-free future. 

At the creative end of the business as much as in 

repro studios Macs are to be found everywhere, but 

much of Apple’s recent efforts seem to have focused on 

consumers. Apple UK sales director Mark Rogers told us 

what the company has been doing for its longeststanding 

customers. 

And so to something completely different: in our 

occasional profile section we preview a book on Indian 

street graphics. Although Photoshop is creeping into 

Bollywood there’s still a vibrant tradition of skilled hand 

painting in the sub-continent. It might be paint on 

wood, steel or canvas but it’s still imaging. 

20 

22 

INDUSTRY VIEW 

What’s Apple done for us in the 

graphic arts business lately? Quite a 

lot, says the company’s Mark Rogers 

COLOUR MANAGEMENT 

You’ve read the theory and know your 

ICC from your ABC but how do you 

actually do colour management? 

Michael Walker takes off the rose 

tinted specs and tackles the nittygritty; 

ColourKit goes with the RGB 

flow in Manchester 

26 SCANNING 

Press ‘scan’ and go home early – is 

professional flatbed scanning really 

that easy now? Michael Walker 

discusses some of the issues that 

might come up on the CCD run; 

scanning for breaking news in Derby 

and for old masters in London 

30 REVIEW 

Bombay mix – a new book pays 

homage to the art of the Indian street 

sign painters 

STYLE WITHOUT 

COMPROMISE 

The prize in this issue’s draw is a 

Fujifilm FinePix F601 Zoom digital 

camera. Ideal for anyone wanting 

style without sacrificing features 

or photographic control, the 

FinePix F601 Zoom saves 

6-megapixel images, has movie 

capabilities and a new colour 

graphical interface, all in a 

compact design. 

To enter the draw, check that your 

details on the faxback form 

inserted into this copy of Imaging 

are correct, tick the prize draw box 

and fax it back to us on the 

number given. The draw will take 

place on 25 November 2002. The 

winner will be notified by post. 

The winner of the FinePix 6800 

Zoom in last issue’s prize draw was 

Malcolm Ware of Nimmos Colour 

Print, Edinburgh. 

www.fujifilm.co.uk/gs 

Imaging magazine is sent free of charge to senior professionals in the graphic 

arts and creative industries. 

Publisher Fuji Photo Film (UK) Limited, 

Graphic Systems Imaging Centre, 

Unit 15, St Martin’s Way, 

St Martin’s Business Centre, Bedford mk42 0lf 

Phone 01234 245245 Fax 01234 245345 

E-mail marketing.fgs@fuji.co.uk 

Editorial MDC Marketing 

Design Hiscock Ransom 

Photography Zafer & Barbara Baran (cover, 8-10), Getty Images (12, 16, 18 

22, 26, 29), Charles Best (15, 19, 20, 29), Richard Faulks (24), 

Steve Atterwill (28), Andrew Hasson (30-31) 

Illustration Paul Wearing (4, 6) 

Fujifilm Graphic Systems welcomes readers’ comments and suggestions. 

Please contact us by post, fax or e-mail, ensuring that all communications 

are clearly marked ‘Imaging magazine’. 

Imaging 12 autumn 2002 3

S 

elling print over the Internet 

is still only just taking off in 

the UK. In the US, the 

Internet is a well-established 

shop window for printers, but here in the 

UK, where printers are sometimes slow to 

promote their services, ‘e-print’ has been 

slower to catch on. In the UK, America’s 

plethora of e-print services – e-printers, eprint 

providers, auction sites, e-commerce 

enablement providers, e-stores and others 

– has been reduced to two main types of 

service: e-printers and auction sites. 

Auction sites (sometimes known as ebrokerages) 

are online print procurement 

services that accept clients’ job specifications 

and pass them for quoting to 

suitable printers chosen from a membership 

roster. Auction sites are funded via 

the member printers, either through a pertransaction 

levy (usually added to the cost 

of the job before the quotes are passed to 

the customer) or annual membership fees, 

or occasionally both. 

Auction sites have grabbed the headlines 

over the past few years because 

many were launched during the dotcom 

boom of the late 90s and subsequently 

shaken out by the bust of the early 2000s: 

a good half of the original sites have 

either ceased trading (PrintMountain, 

Tactica, Eprintshop and Print-On-Demand 

all ceased trading during 2001) or substantially 

re-orientated their business in order 

to stay afloat, as in the case of 58K.com, 

acquired by print outsourcer Servador last 

year, and printbynet.com which recently 

joined forces with a Tonbridge-based 

printer. Although this would seem to argue 

that online brokering doesn’t have a great 

future in the print industry, optimism 

remains high, at least from the auction 

sites themselves: Simon Biltcliffe, MD of 

Web-based print broker WebMart says his 

business is growing by about 15 per cent 

each year. 

From a printer’s point of view, auction 

sites represent a far more casual involvement 

with e-print than a self-operated 

Web site: with no investment other than 

the individual job’s levies or membership 

fees, there’s little to lose. On the other 

hand, auction sites are essentially onetrick 

ponies for buying and selling of print, 

offering no other added-value services 

such as job tracking or stock fulfilment. 

In reality, auction sites have a very 

mixed press: printers are wary because the 

perception is that they tend to force prices 

down. There is also the view that unless an 

auction site uses some very well thoughtout 

quote request forms, the telling detail 

of a job can lie undiscovered until too late, 

fouling up its profitability: this happens 

often enough in the normal course of 

printing life, but is more likely to happen 

via an auction site because the customers 

E-COMMERCE buying and selling print on-line 

Testing the e-print water 

THE E-PRINT SECTOR HAS SUFFERED FROM THE SAME SHAKE-OUT AS THE REST OF THE DOTCOM WORLD 

BUT IS NOW LOOKING MORE STABLE. KAREN CHARLESWORTH EXAMINES THE OPTIONS FOR SELLING PRINT 

SERVICES ONLINE. 

are, in general, less skilled at specifying 

print. And if glitches are discovered, the 

emphasis of auction sites on more casual 

print buying means that the customer 

loyalty that might in other circumstances 

help to cushion unexpected price rises is 

generally not present. 

Tales abound of printers accepting jobs 

quoted via an auction site only to find a 

heavy solid that needs extra drying time, 

or a complex finishing section that needs 

to be sent out. In these circumstances, the 

IF YOU’VE GOT SOME SPARE PRESS CAPACITY, SURELY 

IT’S BETTER TO FILL IT AT LESS PROFIT THAN CAN BE 

MADE ON THE BRANDED PRINT THAN TO HAVE IT 

STANDING IDLE 

printer has to either print the job anyway 

and take the extra cost on the chin, or 

approach the customer and ask for extra 

money, so risking the customer’s goodwill. 

One Greater Manchester commercial 

printer has been caught out in this way so 

many times that he withdrew from the 

service altogether. 

However, auction sites put up a robust 

defence: most sites see themselves as 

offering a viable alternative to printers’ 

own marketing, which sells the company’s 

print as a branded product; but if you’ve 

got some spare press capacity, the argument 

goes, surely it’s better to fill it at less 

profit than can be made on the branded 

print, than to have it standing idle? It’s an 

argument that finds a toehold particularly 


E-COMMERCE buying and selling print on-line 

with volume printers such as the 16pp- 

48pp web printers and larger commercial 

sheetfed concerns, many of whom battle 

to keep their super-productive presses 

busy throughout the shift pattern. One 

Bristol-based web printer describes his 

experience with an auction site as “a 

useful top-up to our schedule when we’re 

quiet – and we’ve even picked up a couple 

of repeat customers from it.” 

A further refinement of the auction 

site is the e-print procurement service: a 

third-party online service that sells the 

services of a small number of printers, in 

which the printer is generally invisible to 

the customer. The lack of direct contact 

between customer and printer, together 

with the restricted membership, are the 

two features that distinguish an e-print 

procurement service from an auction site. 

Any printer signing up to an e-print procurement 

service should resign themselves 

to the fact that this is a pure press-filling 

exercise, because there’s very little chance 

of picking up any direct customers; on the 

other hand, an e-print procurement 

service does protect pricing more, simply 

because of its limited membership. 

Put your web on the Web 

‘E-printers’ – printers offering their 

services via their own e-commerceenabled 

Web sites – are the fastest-growing 

section of the Internet print economy. 

Printers who have gone down this route 

include Williams Lea (www.williamslea.com) 

and Grasmere Digital Imaging (www. 

cardcorp.co.uk). Self-owned Web sites can 

attract new customers, though more 

usually they cater for established customers 

needing an online purchasing facility. 

A printer’s own Web site can offer 

widely varying levels of sophistication, 

ranging from a basic quote request that’s 

emailed to the estimating department, 

through to the full service of automatically-generated 

quote, template design, 

job submission and online tracking of the 

job through the factory. 

A handful of printers have taken on 

Web designers to put their sites together, 

but the more accepted route is via the offthe-shelf 

e-commerce front-end packages 

offered by the major MIS suppliers: these 

hook up to the printer’s MIS and feed the 

data received via the Web site straight into 

the system, triggering estimates, sales 

orders, job tickets and invoicing. MIS 

suppliers Tharstern, Shuttleworth, 

Optichrome, PrintCafe and others all offer 

6 


e-commerce front-ends that can be 

operated independently or connected to 

the relevant MIS; prices range from around 

£15,000 to £30,000 for an entry-level 

e-commerce package. 

A refinement of the self-owned Web 

site is a third-party online system. These 

sites vary in the level of sophistication of 

the service they offer, but generally set up 

a communications channel between 

printers (sometimes including repro houses 

and designers) and customers through 

which jobs can be ordered and tracked 

through a printer’s factory, templates held

online and modified, stock called off and 

quotes requested. 

The disadvantage of a third-party 

online system is that there is no link to a 

printer’s MIS (although some can add this 

on request), which calls for slow and 

potentially inaccurate re-keying; on the 

other hand, the advantage of a third-party 

facilitator is that their livelihood depends 

on wide inter-connectivity, and so many 

have adopted the CIP4 communications 

standard and the JDF file format for job 

ticketing – MIS suppliers have not hurried 

to do this, secure in the knowledge that 

their proprietary systems need only 

connect to their own MIS offerings. 

Better for customers 

than printers? 

The rise of MIS-linked Internet front-ends 

means that these days third-party 

facilitators tend to be more attractive to 

customers looking to set up e-commerce 

links with a printer, rather than printers 

looking to set up e-commerce links with 

customers, and this sector is developing 

slowly: 

“The market for our e-procurement 

offering has not developed as fast as we 

had expected,” admitted Warren Tayler of 

ControlP (www.ctrlp.com) earlier this year. 

Perhaps the greatest advantage of a 

self-owned Web site is control: it’s up to 

the printer what pricing structure is used 

to produce a quote. Additionally, Web 

sites that encompass some form of template 

design or modification – where 

typically a business card has its name 

updated, or a previously-printed brochure 

has some text modified – provide a PDF 

proof that is also used to make the artwork, 

so maintaining data integrity. 

In addition, a self-owned Web site 

opens the door for wider and more flexible 

e-trading than the auction sites. The MIS 

front-ends offer the ability to log in 

named customers and customise the 

procurement and job tracking screens to 

the customer’s corporate style, providing 

an excellent way of tying customers in. 

Many of the larger corporates are beginning 

to move towards e-procurement, and 

don’t see why they shouldn’t buy their 

print online, just as they buy their office 

supplies and furniture: there are plenty of 

examples of printers winning large 

facilities-management type contracts on 

the strength of their ability to offer the 

customer an online stock call-off facility 

via their Web sites. 

Auction sites 

Currently successful 

auction sites include 

www.go-yoyo.com 

www.printon.com 

www.printbuyers.co.uk 

www.printrader.com 

www.printpricer.co.uk 

e-print procurement 

services 

These front for small 

groups of printers and 

include: 

www.buyweboffset.com 

www.vistaprint.com 

www.estreet-id.com 

www.iprint.com 

Third-party online 

systems 

Tools to set up communications 

between 

printers and customers 

are available from: 

www.triplearc.com 

www.ikon.com 

www.printchannel.com 

www.ctrlp.com 

WHAT TO ASK 

AUCTION SITES AND E-PRINT PROCUREMENT SERVICES 

How much detail must the plant list provide? 

You may not want to make the finer details of your equipment semi-public. 

How many printers are actively producing work via the system? 

58K.com has 750 European printers signed up, but how many of those are regularly getting 

work from the site? The difference between printers who are active and those who are simply 

registered can be significant: too great a discrepancy may imply that the service doesn’t 

attract many customers, or that a majority of users are disenchanted with the service. 

Can the printer contact the customer directly with job queries? 

If not, you can end up with a bad case of Chinese Whispers; a reputable auction site should 

always facilitate direct contact. 

How much detail does the request for quotation form demand? 

It’s probably as well to give any forms the once-over. Any good auction site should at least 

consider your reasonable requests for extensions of the form. 

What’s the fee structure? 

Are you looking at membership fees (and at what frequency), a per-transaction levy, or 

both? How much are the fees? If you’re considering signing up to an e-print procurement 

provider, expect fees in all cases to be higher, simply because of the smaller number of 

printers involved in the scheme. 

MIS-LINKED FRONT ENDS 

What facilities are available? 

Good systems offer job tracking (with a customisable level of detail), stock call-offs for FM 

or pre-printed goods, template design and modification and a request for quotation. 

Will the system link to your MIS? 

There’s no point in investing in a sophisticated Web front-end if you have to re-key all the 

details into the MIS when an order comes in. 

What level of investment in the MIS is necessary? 

Expect to need an estimating module, a stock module, a shop-floor data collection module 

and a sales order processing module to implement a full e-print front-end. 

THIRD-PARTY ONLINE SYSTEMS 

Can the system be linked to an in-house MIS? 

If not, generating any volume of business through a third-party system will slow you down 

and add extra costs. 

What functionality does the site offer? 

Is it simply quote requests, or are template design and ordering also offered? 

What is the pricing structure? 

Is there any per-transaction levy? Who pays for the system, the printer or the printer’s 

customer? 

More customers or 

more business? 

If you’re considering dipping a toe in the 

e-print water, the most important question 

to ask is just what, exactly, you’re hoping 

to gain from it: new customers, or new 

business? If you’re looking for new 

customers, don’t go to an e-print procurement 

service, because customers here deal 

only with the service and not with you; in 

this case, a self-operated Web site to 

attract new business would be better. 

If you simply want to fill spare press 

capacity, an auction site is ideal – provided 

you can satisfy yourself that the site’s 

quotation forms ask the right questions. If 

you’re looking to establish closer links with 

your existing customers, go for a selfowned 

Web site with a set of customerspecific 

facilities, or go for a third-party 

online system, which can provide the 

necessary customer tie-ups without 

putting additional demands on your own 

Web site. ■ 


ometimes it’s best to sit on 

the beach and let the tides of 

fashion wash in and out. 

Telecommunications spent 

the 1990s as the darling of investors who 

wouldn’t mostly recognise a byte if it bit 

them, only to spend the whole of the 

twenty-first century so far as its second 

greatest villain (right after those dodgy 

dotcoms). Meanwhile the graphic arts 

industry simply got on with using the 

actual connections through thick and thin. 

The underlying comms networks keep 

on improving, sometimes quickly, more 

often glacially, and in the meantime their 

interchangeable owners occasionally go 

bust or merge, so you get a different 

name on the bill. No big deal. 

What is a big deal is that online 

services are set to move to centre stage in 

your portfolio. There’s more to data 

comms than sending files and listing your 

plant and services on a Web site: repro 

houses and printers can use ever-faster 

servers and data links to offer their 

customers pre-flight file checking, soft 

proofing, remote hard proof management, 

digital asset management and e-trading. 

As well as helping jobs run more smoothly, 

8 

E-COMMERCE online services 

Delivering value digitally 

DATA COMMUNICATIONS MEANS A WHOLE LOT MORE THAN JUST SENDING A FILE 

FROM A TO B THESE DAYS. SIMON ECCLES PLUGS INTO A WORLD OF ONLINE SERVICES. 

S 


these services can add significant perceived 

value, helping to build customer 

loyalty. When service is all that differentiates 

suppliers, this could be a crucial 

competitive edge. 

ISDN and ADSL 

While newspapers were using data comms 

decades before the term was coined, the 

general graphic arts industry only really 

started to cotton on in the mid-to-late 

80s. ISDN really hit its stride from the 

early 90s, allowing fast and reliable file 

delivery just as it became desirable to whiz 

digital images around. ISDN is a direct 

dial-up digital connection between sender 

and receiver, though most ISPs now offer 

ISDN access numbers for general purpose 

Internet connection as well. Basic rate 

ISDN is 64 Kbits/sec, though it’s most 

common to find twin-channel installations 

that can be ganged up to provide 128 

Kbits/sec (though not all ISPs support this 

for Internet connection). ISDN is supported 

by well-established file transfer 

software, such as 4Sight Transmission 

Manager or Hermstedt Grand Central Pro, 

which provide sophisticated job queues 

and notification of arrival to both ends. 

ISDN is now being supplanted by 

ADSL, an always-on broadband Internet 

connection that uses standard phone wires 

and allows you to upload files four times 

faster than basic rate ISDN2 at 256 

Kbits/sec, with downloads going twice as 

fast again at 512 Kbits/sec. Higher speeds 

of up to 2 Mbits/sec download are also 

available though more expensive. ADSL is 

now widely available (though not in all 

areas) and the cheapest rate is now 

around £25 + VAT per month with no call 

changes or megabyte limits, although 

contention ratios might become an issue 

as uptake increases. As ADSL is an 

Internet connection to an ISP rather than 

a point-to-point connection, file transfers 

are primarily via e-mail, FTP or a managed 

service (see below). 

ADSL ‘modems’ are available as low 

cost USB devices, or for larger installations, 

as routers that sit on standard 

Ethernet networks, managing Internet 

traffic for the whole network. 

DIY file transfer 

A lot of repro houses and their customers 

put in ISDN years ago and are still 

perfectly happy with it. It’s reliable and

easonably fast, with the two-channel 

configuration achieving about a megabyte 

a minute in either direction. Four- and 

eight-channel ISDN set-ups are possible 

but remember that you pay a line rental 

and per-minute call charges for each 

channel you use. 

For those with suitably fast connections, 

email works perfectly well for file 

transfer, provided that the email client 

software at both ends can handle large 

attachments and that the ISP does not set 

limits on attachments – some free/budget 

ISPs do this but by the same token are 

less likely to offers ISDN or ADSL connection. 

Delivery will then depend on the 

whims of the Internet and you won’t get 

any automatic confirmation when the file 

reaches the other end. 

FTP (file transfer protocol) over the 

Internet is also popular with repro houses 

and printers, as all they need is a passive 

folder on their computers (and a permanent 

Internet connection), with the 

customer responsible for uploading or 

downloading files. While entry-level ADSL 

apparently offers significantly better 

performance than twin-channel ISDN 

(twice as fast for uploading, four times as 

fast for downloading), in practice you 

probably won’t quite achieve this unless 

no one else in your area is using ADSL. 

A benefit of the email route is that the 

ultimate recipient’s computer doesn’t even 

need to be on when you want to send, as 

the message is stored on their ISP’s mail 

server until they log in to download it. 

Also, distance is no object, as international 

deliveries via the Internet cost no more 

than local ones. 

Managed services 

Guaranteed delivery via managed communications 

was the concept that Vio and 

Wam!Net plugged with their dedicated 

graphic arts networks launched in 1998. 

You hit the send button, they do the rest 

and ensure that the file gets there, 

reporting to you when it does. 

Both got their pricing models wrong at 

first and struggled to make an impact on 

the industry. However, after a rethink both 

are back in contention, offering public 

Internet compatibility and a range of 

graphics-friendly online services such as 

file sharing, remote soft proofing and 

asset management. Last year they gained 

a new rival, Group Logic, which launched 

its MassTransit service which runs on a 

server at your premises. This will work with 

anything that can link to the Internet. 

An interesting newcomer is Net 

Integration Technologies, which offers a 

low-cost all-in-one network manager, Web 

server and communications server with 

prices starting at £2000 including a PC to 

run it on. The comms aspect is similar to 

Wam!Net’s ‘Purple Box’ or the GroupLogic 

ideas – the server sits on the end of any 

connection – and is responsible for 

looking after output queues and making 

sure that files arrive. 

A neat feature becomes available when 

you install a Net Integrator server at both 

send and receive sites. You can then run 

the special £1650 eQue large-graphics 

handling software, which compares 

original and edited files and just transmits 

the differences, not the whole file. All Mac 

and PC file types are supported, so a 

customer only needs to send a large file 

once to the repro house (or vice versa). 

Electronic ad delivery 

Ten years ago UK newspapers and ad 

repro companies began adopting the 

ISDN-based ADS (Ad Delivery System) 


E-COMMERCE online services 

system from 4Sight (now owned by 

Wam!Net). This ran at both send and 

receive sites to convert QuarkXPress files 

into validated, standardised EPS files with 

embedded fonts, a preview and a job 

ticket. ADS was replaced last year by 

4Sight’s lower cost (£1695) Transmission 

Director, which runs over any Internet 

connection as well as ISDN and switches 

main support to PDF files, though it can 

still send EPS to standard ADS sites. 

The past few years have seen a crop of 

alternatives to ADS spring up. Portland 

PMS developed its own, lower cost PDFbased 

system called Ad Express/AdGate, 

10 


which has been widely adopted by UK 

regional newspapers. AdExpress is also the 

basis of the Newspaper Society’s AdFast 

submission service, which is free to members. 

Newspapers install AdGate receiver 

software (£400 per annum) and publish 

their print specifications on the AdExpress 

Web site. Senders use Ad Express (£150 a 

year) and the published specs to create 

validated PDFs, and the system won’t 

send a file unless the correct specs have 

been applied for the particular receiver. 

Australian developer QuickCut has also 

been making a significant impact on the 

UK market, currently listing some 420 

users. Originally offered by Vio as a service 

to subscribers, it’s now independent and 

will run with any comms network, costing 

£1050 plus a per-square-centimetre delivery 

fee. Again there’s an online database 

of publishers’ specs, but these create 

layout templates for QuarkXPress or other 

design programs. Files can’t be sent until 

they pass a 60-point check against specs; 

passed files are converted to EPS or PDF 

for transmission. There are also modules 

for managed job delivery via the QuickCut 

servers with tracking and reporting at both 

ends, plus soft proofing with support for 

ICC profiles.

Smart pre-flighting 

One of the most interesting recent developments 

has been the marrying of preflight 

checking to file delivery systems. It’s 

the same idea as the newspaper systems 

that won’t send files until they’ve passed 

muster. Indeed, 4Sight’s Transmission 

Director works for both newspaper or 

commercial applications. 

Starting with a QuarkXPress document, 

Transmission Director controls the conversion 

to PDF, using receiver-supplied Adobe 

Acrobat Distiller profiles if needed. It validates 

the files (though the checks are 

fairly basic), attaches job tickets and sends 

directly to the receiver. The receiving end 

can also validate files and, depending on 

the job ticket, launch an AppleScript 

routine or send the file to a hot folder. 

Extensis Preflight Online emphasises 

the pre-flight aspect and works with any 

Internet link. It’s available either as a 

service hosted by Extensis itself (for a 

£4200 set up fee plus about 70p per file), 

or printers can install their own servers 

and customise the appearance. Senders 

access the receiver’s URL within the site, 

which downloads a plug-in to run preflighting 

on their computer. It can read 

QuarkXPress 4.x, PDF or EPS formats. 

Problems are reported to both ends but 

only passed files can be uploaded. 

Markzware’s MarkzNet is essentially a 

toolkit to write routines for automated 

pre-delivery validation routines, file upload 

and post-delivery processing. Job tickets 

containing validation checks are generated 

on the fly and downloaded in response to 

initial job details provided by the sender. 

MarkzNet is the basis of the online preflighting 

part of Fujifilm’s myfujifilm.com 

online services trial in North America. It’s 

also part of the Newspaper Society’s 

AdFast and the Periodical Publishers’ 

Association’s Pass4Press online preflighting 

services. Costing from about 

£5000 it’s powerful and flexible, but can 

be hard to set up, so Markzware has 

introduced GoodToGo, a simplified system 

that it hosts itself and which applies 20 

pre-flight checks. It works with most DTP 

and graphics file formats and is available 

in three service levels, starting with a 

£2457 set-up fee and £140 monthly 

subscription for up to 350 transactions. 

Extending services 

Reliable file transfer and validation between 

customer and service house are 

possibly the biggest benefits of online 

services so far. However, file transfer, 

though vital, is only the first of the comms 

services to affect pre-press and printing 

companies; the concept of pre-flighting by 

remote control opens up the market for 

bi-directional workflows between 

customers and suppliers. 

The past couple of years has seen the 

emergence of sophisticated customersupplier 

links that allow proper online 

trading relationships to be set up. These 

allow requests for quotes (RFQs), job 

ordering and the delivery of validated files 

by customers, and in the other direction, 

the supply of live job status information, 

stored images and digital proofs. 

The emerging JDF print production file 

format (see cover story, last issue) will play 

a part here too: it lets customers define 

initial job specifications which can be 

transferred straight into the estimating 

modules of MIS systems, for accurate and 

speedy automation of RFQs. Online 

storage and management of customers’ 

digital assets by repro companies is finally 

starting to happen too (see page 12). 

Online services offer new ways to build 

relationships, add value and differentiate 

yourself in an increasingly commoditised 

print market. Customers may think that 

the printing is the same everywhere, but 

making it easier to get jobs in, checked, 

and out again might make all the difference 

to who gets to do them. ■ 

All prices quoted in this article are approximate UK list prices 

and were correct at time of going to press; potential 

customers for the products and services mentioned should 

confirm pricing with the relevant supplier. 

ONLINE ALPHABET SOUP 

Online info 

AdExpress 

www.adexpress.co.uk 

AdFast 

www.adfast.co.uk 

Extensis 

www.extensis.com 

GoodToGo 

www.gtgeurope.com 

Group Logic 

www.grouplogic.com 

Hermstedt 

www.hermstedt.co.uk 

Markzware 

www.markzware.com 

Net Integration 

www.eurographicsales.com 

Quickcut 

www.quickcut.com 

Wam!Net/4Sight 

www.wamnet.co.uk 

Vio 

www.vio.com 

Here’s a guide to some of the terms used in the comms and online 

services business. 

ADSL – Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line – high speed digital 

Internet connection via standard phone wiring, typically gives 

512 Kbit/sec download, 256 Kbit/sec uploads. A permanent 

connection, with flat-rate pricing. 

Bandwidth – measure of data carrying capacity of a digital link. 

512 Kbit/sec and above referred to as ‘broadband’. 

Contention ratio – how many subscribers may be sharing a digital 

link (usually ADSL, though also applies to dial-up modems) at once. 

Usually 50:1 for ‘home’ packages, 20:1 for business. 

Dial-up – ‘old fashioned’ modem-based Internet access via standard 

telephone line. Limited to 56 Kbit/sec and you won’t get that out of 

most phone lines. 

ISDN – Integrated Services Digital Network – the standard in 

prepress datacomms, ISDN supports multiples of 64 Kbit/sec 

adapted phone lines, most commonly two, giving 128 Kbit/sec. Can 

provide Internet and point-to-point connectivity but charged by 

usage; multiple lines count as multiple calls. 

FTP – File Transfer Protocol – the network standard for copying files 

across the Internet; most Web browsers support FTP but there are 

also various FTP utilities for batch/high volume work. 

ISP – Internet Service Provider – the company providing your point 

of connection to the Internet. 

Point-to-point – sending data directly to its ultimate recipient 

(eg 4Sight ISDN Manager) as opposed to sending via a third party 

(eg sending via an ISP’s email service). 


E-COMMERCE digital asset management 

12 

< steel, waves, fence, flower, cog, cactu 

From archive to asset 

TRYING TO TAP INTO THE NEW MEDIA BOOM BY SETTING UP A WEB DESIGN DEPARTMENT MAY 

HAVE BEEN A MISTAKE FOR PRINTERS, BUT PROVIDING A DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT SERVICE 

IS AN OPPORTUNITY THAT BUILDS ON EXISTING SKILLS, AND CAN INCREASE REVENUE AND 

CUSTOMER LOYALTY. KAREN CHARLESWORTH EXPLAINS. 

Imaging 12 autumn 2002

T 

heart of a digital asset 

agement service is its metadata: 

rt descriptions, thumbnails 

/or keywords relating to the 

ets that are stored in a 

abase and searched by the user. 

adata can be entered per asset 

automatically on a batch basis. 

metadata is linked to the 

et itself, which is normally 

red on a central server for 

y retrieval by terminals running 

ent access and 

he radical conclusions of the 

Pira/DTi joint study, 

Publishing in the Knowledge 

Economy, published in June 

this year, sent shockwaves through the 

industry. Publishers who are not prepared 

to embrace multiple delivery systems face 

a bleak future: “While there is no sign of 

the disappearance of print as a medium, it 

is no longer helpful to conceive of publishing 

solely in these terms,” was the 

report’s verdict. “Increasingly, publishing is 

a set of skills and core competences consisting 

of the acquisition, selection, 

editing, management and sale of content.” 

While there is no immediate danger for 

printers and repro houses, they must not 

rest on their laurels, the report concluded: 

there are enormous opportunities for 

climbing aboard the content management 

bandwagon, and by doing so, securing 

customer loyalty and opening up new 

revenue streams. 

According to the 2001 Frost & Sullivan 

report Digital Asset Management Markets, 

content management is one of the fastestgrowing 

business-to-business sectors: the 

US market has grown from $68m in 1997 

to $839m in 2000, a twelve-fold increase 

in three years. 

Multi-channel mistake? 

The phrase ‘multi-channel delivery’ tends 

to elicit groans from printers: the concept 

isn’t new and has been heavily discredited 

in recent years. Five years ago, many 

column inches were being devoted to the 

exciting new idea that printers might also 

offer Web and CD design using the same 

content as the printed document. 

Despite investing heavily in equipment, 

software and staff, only a dozen or so UK 

printers ever managed to establish successful 

new media divisions, and most of 

those have struggled to stay alive in the 

sadder and wiser world that followed the 

dotcom boom-and-bust of the late 1990s. 

So it seems that UK printers have been 

there and done that. Or have they? Pira 

and the DTi think not – their suggestions 

for how printers can capitalise on the new 

media boom are subtly different. The 

THE ADVANTAGES OF OFFERING A DIGITAL ASSET 

MANAGEMENT SERVICE ARE PERSUASIVE: ADDITIONAL 

REVENUE AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY 

report points towards one related group of 

services that all types of printers and repro 

houses can offer: digital asset management 

(DAM). Put simply, the idea is for 

printers to look after their clients’ stock of 

collateral so that assets can be called off 

and sent to new media designers, other 

printers, print designers, TV stations and 

so on as and when needed. 

Printers and repro houses will be 

familiar with the general principle of 

digital asset management. Most probably 

already do something like this for their 

customers on an informal (for which read 

‘unpaid’) basis. But in Pira’s brave new 

Knowledge Economy, the informal is set to 

become formal on a grand scale. 

“Any customer who regularly places 

print is likely to have a set of assets that 

needs to be carefully managed as they 

move towards different publishing channels,” 

says Mark Stephenson, Fujifilm 

Graphic Systems’ sales support manager. 

“Sometimes the customer may want to do 

that management in-house, but they don’t 

always have the expertise or the manpower. 

There is a growing gap in the 

market for service-orientated organisations 

who can look after those assets properly 

and distribute them in suitably repurposed 

form on the customer’s behalf.” 

The advantages to printers of offering 

a digital asset management service are 

persuasive: an additional revenue stream 

and customer loyalty. The opportunities 

for long-term relationship-building are 

immense: even allocating search keywords 

to images in a media database demands 

more than a passing knowledge of the 

customer and his business. 

The UK’s general commercial printers in 

particular are seeing their tally of loyal 

customers declining year on year; the 

asset management service’s implicit 

encouragement to loyalty represents not 

only revenue but also regular income. 

Making it pay 

Charging for digital asset management 

services is a thorny issue. Mark Stephenson 

believes that printers and repro 

houses must use a different pricing model 

for asset management than the per-job 

, spiral, sky, mesh, railway, freight, droplets, 

basis on which they currently work: 

“The pricing structure for asset 

management has to be based on a regular 

retainer, because the work is usually a 

series of small tasks that individually don’t 

amount to much, but would take more 

time to document and invoice individually 

than it would to do the work,” he says. 

“A retainer also allows associated overheads 

to be properly accounted for.” 

Printers and repro houses are particularly 

well-placed to offer digital asset 


E-COMMERCE digital asset management 

For more information on 

any of the DAM products 

mentioned here please visit 

the vendor’s Web site. 

Artesia TEAMS 

www.artesiatech.com 

Banta 

www.banta-im.com 

Extensis Portfolio 

www.extensis.com 

Picdar Hosted Media Mogul 

www.picdar.com 

Pine Tree Systems Mosaic 

www.pine.dk 

Quark DMS 

euro.quark.com 

Union Technologies 

Resourca 

www.utluk.com 

WebWare Mambo 

www.webwarecorp.com 

14 

DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT – THE TECHNOLOGY 

The heart of a DAM service is its asset 

management software, or the system that 

allows storage and retrieval of media, and 

according to Ursula Connolly of storage 

networking specialists Sagitta Performance 

Systems, “this is the bit that costs money”. 

Connolly’s advice is “spend as much as you 

can afford – there’s no point committing your 

assets to a system that restricts your access 

to them.” 

There are two levels of digital asset 

management software: ‘enterprise’, or a 

system that can be used to offer a service to 

customers, and ‘in-house’ or ‘closed’ systems. 

The differences are not necessarily in 

functionality (although generally an enterprise 

system offers separate and protected 

administrator and client access) but more in 

robustness, level of customisability and cost. 

Both levels of system are usually set up to 

handle a variety of media types: images, text, 

audio, video and laid-out documents. 

Off-the-shelf systems include Quark’s 

Digital Media System (DMS), which can track 

usage and manage revisions, and Extensis’ 

Portfolio suite of Web-based cataloguing, 

retrieval and distribution tools. Wellrespected 

all-round systems designed for 

enterprise level use include Artesia’s TEAMS, 

management services, partly because they 

already have a relationship with customers 

that centres around the production of 

collateral, but mainly because they also 

have expertise in image handling – and for 

all that many digital asset management 

databases are set up to handle a variety of 

media, images still account for the vast 

majority of current digital assets. Printers 

can harness their current image handling 

skills to build up a strong digital asset 

management service, while at the same 


WebWare’s Mambo and Pine Tree Systems’ 

Mosaic. There are also systems that handle 

primarily one type of media, with subsidiary 

capabilities for others. 

Some DAM services, such as Picdar’s 

Hosted Media Mogul, exist exclusively on the 

Web: typically, an account initialisation fee 

followed by a monthly subscription buys a set 

amount of space on a server, together with 

browser-based software for archiving and 

retrieval. myfujifilm.com, currently being 

trialled in the US, is another Web-based 

system, although oriented more towards inhouse 

use: the system also includes workflow 

tools such as online proofing and preflighting. 

There are also hybrid systems such 

as Union Technologies’ Resourca, which can 

deliver via both in-house Web or intranet 

servers, or via outsourced ASP servers run by 

Union Technologies. 

One issue for DAM service providers is 

rights protection: where copyrighted images 

or other media are stored and distributed, 

often the service provider is called upon to 

implement a royalties levy. Some asset 

management software has ancillary rightsprotection 

packages for this purpose. 

Re-purposing of assets involves any 

manipulation of the asset for a specific 

time adding skills to handle more unusual 

media types. 

Competition for printers and repro 

houses is likely to come from advertising 

agencies, which have long offered their 

clients an asset management service based 

on manual cataloguing and storage of 

transparencies or, more recently, scans. 

Creative thinking required 

As DAM develops in the UK, advertising 

agencies may win over printers simply 

output channel. Re-purposing high-resolution 

print images for use on a Web site, for 

instance, might involve re-sizing, reducing 

resolution, converting CMYK to RGB and 

applying a colour profile. Some systems 

– particularly those tied into pre-press 

workflow for printers of regular publications 

– can handle automatic re-purposing, in 

which a number of parameters determine an 

asset’s appearance in a given output form. 

Once the software has been chosen, 

there’s the infrastructure to be determined – 

the storage and access hardware. There are 

primary and secondary storage banks: primary 

consists of online hard disks and RAID arrays; 

secondary consists of removable media such 

as DVDs or CDs. 

Data security is almost as important as 

the asset management software itself. This 

means thinking about physical security, 

controlling access to data and maintaining 

data integrity. DAM companies often have 

multiple back-up practices in place, including 

hourly, daily, and weekly routines, with a 

strict rotation of back-ups kept in a variety of 

secure locations. Web-based systems offer 

the advantage that their data is stored offsite 

– security and back-up are the 

responsibility of the system provider. 

imber, desert, water, lights, feather, chips > 

The heart of a digital asset 

management service is its metadata: 

short descriptions, thumbnails 

and/or keywords relating to the 

assets that are stored in a 

database and searched by the user. 

Metadata can be entered per asset 

or automatically on a batch basis. 

The metadata is linked to the 

asset itself, which is normally 

stored on a central server for 

because they have in-house designers on 

hand to take creative decisions about repurposing, 

as Mark Stephenson says: 

“Not all re-purposing is about re-sizing 

– it makes more sense for a customer to 

place a digital asset management contract 

with an outfit who can design from 

scratch where necessary, and printers 

don’t always have designers in-house.” 

However, as Stephenson points out, 

where printers do offer design to 

strengthen their asset management

service, there is plenty of business to be 

found: “Not all customers need a full-scale 

ad agency. The vast majority of a printer 

or repro house’s asset management 

customers would be happy with sensible, 

functional design services to work 

alongside the re-purposing offering.” 

Stephenson believes the market for 

digital asset management services in the 

UK is set to ‘explode’ in the next few 

years: “It’s here to stay, and there’s a lot of 

money to be made – printers should get 

out there and dive in.” 

Golden opportunity 

Someone who has been doing just that is 

Peterborough-based independent repro 

house Gildenburgh which five years ago 

was under siege from falling prices. One 

part of their solution was to introduce 

digital asset management. 

“We had been keeping archives of our 

customers’ work for a few years, and it 

occurred to us that this was a potential 

revenue stream,” technical director Rob 

Gutteridge says. “And because a high 

proportion of our repro customers are 

publishers, they were interested.” 

The team installed Valiano FullPress 

and WebNative asset management solutions 

from Fujifilm, and began a full DAM 

service, predominantly working with text 

and images. Initially offered to existing 

publishing clients, the service began to 

attract photographers and design agencies 

as word spread. “Repro is still the core 

business, but asset management brings in 

customers we couldn’t otherwise attract,” 

Gutteridge says. 

Pricing was initially a problem for 

Gildenburgh: “Customers have enjoyed 

many years of free data storage, albeit 

hidden, and they aren’t prepared to start 

paying for it unless there are immediate 

rewards,” he explains. “In general it’s the 

forward-thinking publishers, those who 

can see the opportunities for additional 

revenue streams by syndication and repurposing, 

who can see past the costs to 

the benefits.” Working with its clients by 

joint venture, Gildenburgh settled on a 

pricing structure based on the customer’s 

activity level. 

Gutteridge concurs with Fujifilm’s Mark 

Stephenson that DAM is an essential step 

for repro houses. “I think DAM will 

become a core part of any independent 

repro house’s offering in the next few 

years. Those who don’t have it will be 

losing business.” ■ 

WORKFLOW & BUSINESS MANAGEMENT case study – Vertec 

Vertec’s Valiano Rampage 

W 

oolwich-based Vertec was finding by 2001 

that being tied to analogue proofs was 

an increasing competitive disadvantage. 

Prepress manager Colin Gilham explains: 

“We were losing ground to competitors. There was 

client pressure to provide digital proofs and we were 

sometimes losing out at the quote stage.” 

However, not just any digital proofer would do: 

“We had to have bullet-proof digital contract proofing 

but it was hard to decide what – the technology keeps 

changing,” he adds. Having examined various options 

he settled on the Epson 10000 large format inkjet 

plotter, calibrated to match the press rather than viceversa, 

as Gilham says that it’s the press that provides 

the final product. 

The proofer was only half of the equation, though. 

“The only way you can guarantee the proof is if it’s 

made from the same data that will be used to image 

the film and plate.” 

Gilham wanted a ROOM (RIP once output many) 

workflow, in which the same processed data would be 

used to drive both the proofer and the filmsetter – 

“We needed a complete new and faster workflow that 

would eventually support CTP.” 

After a variety of extensive demonstrations, the 

“Valiano Rampage can drive 

almost anything, so we’re 

not tied to any particular 

vendor’s output device.” 

Colin Gilham, prepress manager, Vertec 

Commercial printer Vertec is providing contract digital proofs and accepting 

a wide variety of job formats thanks to a Fujifilm Valiano Rampage RIP. 

Fujifilm Valiano Rampage solution was selected. “The 

product is mature and stable, and most importantly it 

can drive almost anything so it means we’re not tied 

to any particular vendor’s output device,” Gilham says. 

Valiano Rampage offers a choice of working 

modes: in the ROOM mode PostScript or PDF files are 

trapped and then RIPped before imposition. The 

RIPped data can then be sent as single pages or 

complete impositions to the Epson proofer as 

required, with complete confidence that the proof will 

match the eventual film output. 

There is also a NORM (normalise once render 

many) workflow, in which PDFs are generated as 

necessary, normalised (made to conform to a 

predetermined PDF standard) and then sent for 

RIPping on each output device. 

Although the NORM workflow allows greater 

flexibility in handling potential errors in PDF files 

without having to repeat the full-resolution RIPping 

stage each time, Gilham prefers to stick with the 

ROOM mode as he feels that only this can offer the 

guarantee of fidelity between proof and final output. 

Working with RIPped data means handling much 

larger files, but Gilham says, “Rampage is quick 

enough that this is not a hindrance.” 


15

CTP technology – processless plates 

T 

he processless metal litho 

plate has been one of those 

long-term dreams of the 

printing industry that never 

quite turns up in the form you’d expect. 

The idea of a plate that you run through a 

conventional platesetter, take out and put 

straight on to the press seems obvious. It’s 

faster (no processing time), ought to be 

cheaper (no chemistry to buy), and 

environmentally better (no chemistry to 

dispose of). But it’s proving frustratingly 

elusive to achieve. The more plate 

developers look into it, the more they 

appreciate the benefits of good old 

chemical development – and they’re 

doubtless aware that no-process also 

means a loss of revenue from chemistry. 

Over the years plenty of developers 

have announced no-process plates and 

some are actually in production today, but 

so far none have offered a complete 

replacement for conventional chemicallydeveloped 

plates. The main processless 

metal plates currently in full production 

are all intended for on-press imaging in 

digital presses. 

Current predictions suggest that a noprocess 

plate may have a higher total cost 

than a conventionally processed plate plus 

chemistry, which sounds back-to-front. It’s 

all a matter of tolerances – a conventional 

(non-CTP) plate gives very high yields off 

the production line because it can exhibit 

relatively wide production tolerances and 

still work perfectly on the press. A 

chemically-developed CTP plate has 

somewhat lower yields due to more finicky 

tolerance requirements, which is why it 

costs more (though competitive pressure 

and steadily increasing production 

capacity is driving this down). A noprocess 

plate has much narrower 

tolerances, so yields will be smaller and 

prices significantly higher. The basic 

economics of processless don’t yet add up, 

even if manufacturers feel ready to swing 

into full-scale production. 

Derek Wyse, MD of consultancy 

Vantage Strategic Marketing, who 

specialises in printing plate technical and 

market analysis, is sceptical about the 

economic prospects of processless plates 

in the general commercial market, saying, 

“We think it will appeal mainly to the twoand 

four-page press user market, because 

of the costs of equipment.” He believes 

that conventional UV-sensitive offset 

plates exposed by dedicated platesetters 

are the way ahead for larger formats: the 

16 Imaging 12 autumn 2002 

plate production costs, chemistry and onpress 

behaviour are all likely to remain 

more favourable than exotic no-process 

systems, he predicts. 

Paths to process-free 

There are five main technological paths 

available to plate manufacturers seeking 

the processless grail – and you can be sure 

that all the manufacturers will be trying 

out all these processes and more. 

The earliest and so far most widely 

used technology is thermal ablation, where 

a powerful laser blasts a coating away 

from the non-image areas of the plate. 

This is the process used on the waterless 

digital litho presses and it works with both 

metal and polyester plates. The snag is 

that the ablation process generates debris 

– ash or dust burned away by the lasers – 

which is bad news in a precision optical 

device like a platesetter. On-press imagers 

have vacuum extractors and filters on the 

heads. A few platesetters are offered with 

vacuum ‘debris management’ options, but 

so far off-press thermal ablation has found 

relatively few buyers. Also, there’s only 

one plate supplier, which contributes to 

making printers nervous. 

Switchable polymer plates are seen by 

several manufacturers as the ideal for the 

future, though there’s nothing on the 

market yet. The coating covers the whole 

plate and there’s no need for an expensive 

graining process. The laser imager is used 

to alter the plate coating so it switches 

from water-receptive (non-image) to 

water-repellent (image). Creo is experimenting 

with a spray-on switchable 

coating that can be applied on or offpress 

to re-usable metal plates: other 

manufacturers are profoundly sceptical 

that it can be kept dust-free. In any case, 

it seems like a retrograde step, back to the 

days before pre-sensitised litho plates 

revolutionised offset printing in the 1970s. 

MAN Roland uses the unique 

DICOtape process on its DICOweb digital 

web offset press. Here the energy from a 

thermal laser is used to transfer an inkreceptive 

coating from a ribbon of foil 

material onto bare stainless steel cylinders. 

After printing, the ‘plate’ cylinders can be 

scrubbed bare and re-imaged. 

Inkjets seem to be a promising area in 

the longer term. Here a modified printer 

sprays ink-receptive coating onto bare 

metal plates, which then go through a 

chemical hardening process (UV-cured 

inks will probably be suitable in future).

Progress towards processless 

AS CTP INCREASINGLY BECOMES THE NORM, IT WOULD BE GOOD IF WE COULD GET RID OF THE DIRTY 

AND TIME-CONSUMING PLATE PROCESSING STAGE. SIMON ECCLES REPORTS ON PROGRESS ALONG THE 

ROAD TO PROCESSLESS PARADISE. 

17

CTP technology – processless plates 

18 

.The current limitation is resolution: the 

best inkjets on the market don’t produce 

fine enough image control to generate a 

full range of halftone dots, which is why 

today’s inkjet proofers can only produce 

rudimentary screen simulations. This will 

undoubtedly improve. 

The fifth technique is the ‘develop in 

fount solution’ approach, exemplified by 

Fujifilm’s Brillia LD-NS plate shown at Ipex 

earlier this year. When Fujifilm announced 

that it would be showing a new processless 

metal litho plate at Ipex, people took 

notice. The company had always said that, 

as with violet plates, it wasn’t going to 

announce anything until it was satisfied 

that the technology was nailed-down and 

sufficiently reliable. 

And indeed the Brillia LD-NS is a 

working processless metal plate that’s 

going through the final third-party device 

approval stage and is almost ready to ship 

to users. But you can’t run it in your 

platesetter: it’s really only designed to 

work with digital litho presses with onpress 

thermal imagers. 

How it works 

“We call it ‘dry thermal processless’,” says 

Sean Lane, product manager for plates at 

Fujifilm Graphics Systems, “although it 

doesn’t require a chemical development 

stage, it does need to be run-up on a 

press to activate it.” 

The plate uses two coatings over 

conventional aluminium: an ink-receptive 


layer covered by a water-receptive layer. 

An 830 nm thermal laser imager writes to 

the image areas, degrading and partly 

ablating the water-receptive layer above. 

After the imaging run, you run the press 

up in the normal way, engage the ink and 

dampening rollers, put it into pressure and 

start running sheets. The degraded coating 

is then stripped off by the ink and 

dampening solution and is mainly 

deposited onto the paper during the first 

IT’S STILL CLEARLY EARLY DAYS FOR PROCESSLESS, DESPITE THE 

ATTRACTIONS OF TIME SAVING AND ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS 

few impressions. Some coating dissolves 

into the ink and fountain solution but 

doesn’t affect printing quality. The plate 

then starts to print normally, attracting ink 

and water in the appropriate areas. 

The difference is that water is picked 

up by the coating rather than the bare 

aluminium of a conventional plate; 

currently Fujifilm is quoting a run length 

of 20,000 to 30,000 impressions as the 

plate can’t be baked to extend its life. 

However, as the digital presses it’s 

intended for are short-run devices by 

definition, this is not viewed as a big 

drawback: “We think the run lengths will 

be improved in future,” adds Sean Lane. 

In principle you could image Brillia LD- 

NS on a conventional off-press thermal 

platesetter with no processor attached, 

then mount it on the press and develop it 

during the run-up. However, this is not 

recommended: the coating is sensitive to 

handling and is really designed for completely 

hands-off operations on the plate 

cylinder. Also there’s only a faint latent 

image, which can be hard to work with 

manually. 

Wet and digital? 

If you’ve been following the digital press 

market closely you’ll have spotted a bit of 

a limitation already: most of the installed 

presses are waterless, because the thermal 

imagers go where the dampening chain 

would otherwise fit, but Brillia LD-NS 

needs conventional fluid dampening both 

to develop and to print. 

However, there are two wet offset 

digital presses on the market today and a 

third announced: Heidelberg’s B2 format 

Speedmaster 74DI perfecter was introduced 

four years ago and is now available 

in an optional CD carton configuration. 

More than 150 have been sold worldwide. 

Komori’s B1 format Lithrone S40D was 

announced at Drupa 2000 as ‘Project D,’ 

and gained its real name at Ipex last April, 

where it ran live demonstrations of the 

Brillia LD-NS plate with great success. So 

far there is just one UK installation, 

although several more are on order. The 

most recent contender, Sakurai’s Oliver 

574 EPII-DI, a B2 format wet offset DI 

press, was shown at Ipex. 

The arrival of Fujifilm’s Brillia LD-NS 

introduces some choice into this market: 

previously there were limited options if 

you wanted a wet offset plate suitable for 

on-press imaging – Agfa’s Thermolite and 

Thermolite Plus, which Heidelberg also 

supplies under the Saphira name, and 

Presstek’s Pearl Gold. 

“The LD-NS is more resistant to 

scratching and it has a wide press 

latitude,” reports Sean Lane, adding, 

“it even works with metallic inks.” 

Development is complete in a couple of 

sheets he says, which helps make-ready. 

The plate supports 200 lpi screens and 

reproduces dots from 1 – 98 per cent. 

In future Fujifilm will undoubtedly use 

its experience with the LD-NS to produce 

plates for off-press thermal imagesetters 

so they can be used with conventional 

presses. Whether it will use the same 

process remains to be seen. 

It’s clearly still early days for 

processless, despite the attractions of time 

saving and environmental benefits, 

especially since the economic figures don’t 

add up too well yet. Will process-free 

plates ever reach the general market? 

Probably. Which technology will win out? 

Don’t place any bets. Will they replace 

chemistry entirely? Not for a long time. ■

P 

Biddles brings CTP to books 

Rapid plate output and digital archiving with a Fujifilm platesetter 

and workflow server are boosting productivity at a book printer. 

rinting around 100 short-run books a 

week with an average pagination of 

nearly 400 pages meant that Guildfordand 

King’s Lynn-based printer Biddles 

was using two B1 format imagesetters to 

keep its presses busy. The company serves 

publishers of scientific, medical and academic 

titles, and reprints are an important and 

regular part of the business. Some form of 

digital archiving was needed to streamline 

the reprinting procedure, as managing 

director Mick Read explains: 

“We are increasingly looking to offer a 

service whereby we manage the book for its 

entire lifecycle. Being absolutely certain that 

we had located the correct set of films or 

files for the last-printed version of a particular 

job could be difficult, so we needed a 

digital archive that would guarantee that we 

could easily pull up the right file for output 

for any of our presses.” 

Because of the need to make new plates 

for reprinting, CTP would not have been 

economic – until the arrival of Fujifilm’s Luxel 

P-9600CTP platesetter. Able to output 43 B1 

plates an hour, the P-9600CTP changed the 

economics around, and only two months 

after its installation, Mick Read is able to 

confirm, “the work comes out quicker, the 

image quality is better, so there’s less press 

downtime.” 

“Fujifilm were quick to grasp what we 

wanted to do and very helpful in designing 

the complete system to achieve that end 

result,” he adds. 

The Luxel platesetter is able to keep the 

various presses at Guildford fed, using its 

auto-loader system that enables 300 plates 

to be kept on-line, in the three different 

sizes that Biddles use. The plate size is 

selected automatically when each job is 

downloaded to the platesetter. 

Quality has been improved; several of the 

books produced at Biddles contain monochrome 

halftones and clients can be quite 

demanding about their quality. “The whole 

plate is cleaner,” says prepress overseer Andy 

Balchin. “It’s a first-generation dot, and 

there’s no possibility of getting dirt between 

film and plate as happens in conventional 

platemaking.” 

Digital drivers 

The platesetter is driven by a Fujifilm Valiano 

Rampage RIP which can also drive Biddles’ 

existing imagesetters, enabling the company 

to make a smooth changeover. The RIP 

supports the variable data digital press and 

Docutech printers at the King’s Lynn site as 

well, making it possible to manage jobs 

centrally and route them to the appropriate 

output devices for the required run length. 

PDF – which is the internal file format of 

the Valiano Rampage RIP – also meets the 

digital archiving need: instead of having to 

manage multiple film sets or page layout 

files for different reprints, by working in PDF 

it’s simple to generate a complete new 

‘master’ file for a given reprint. 


CTP case study – Biddles 

“Fujifilm were 

quick to grasp 

what we wanted 

to do and very 

helpful in 

designing the 

complete system 

to achieve that 

end result” 

Mick Read, managing director, Biddles 

19

Apple bites back 

MUCH OF APPLE’S ATTENTION SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN ON CONSUMER PRODUCTS 

RECENTLY, BUT THE COMPANY HAS PLANS TO GET OUT AND MEET ITS LONG-STANDING 

CUSTOMERS IN DESIGN AND PRINT, SAYS APPLE UK’S MARK ROGERS. 

20 Imaging 12 autumn 2002

W 

ith all the iMacs, iPods and 

i-everything else that Apple 

has been using to grab 

attention and win design 

awards recently, its customers in the 

graphics arts business could be forgiven 

for feeling a little ignored lately. 

That’s a perception that Apple’s UK 

sales director Mark Rogers is keen to 

challenge: “With Mac OS X and the new 

range of G4 PowerMacs we have our 

strongest offering yet for the graphic arts 

market,” he claims. 

A major goal at Apple these days is 

moving its installed base to OS X, the 

Unix-based successor to the MacOS 9. 

From next year all new Macs will be able 

to boot up only in Mac OS X, so sooner or 

later we’ll all have to make the move. But 

in many people’s minds the advantages of 

the new operating system are outweighed 

by the lack of a native version of one 

critical piece of software, QuarkXPress. 

X-appeal 

“You can still run QuarkXPress in Mac OS 

X’s Classic mode,” says Rogers, “and it 

works just the same as always.” But it’s 

not the ability to go on doing things as 

before that he really wants to talk about, 

it’s added benefits of doing them under 

Mac OS X that Apple wants us to 

understand. Some of the well-documented 

strengths of Unix – namely stability and 

“WE’RE APPOINTING PEOPLE WHO 

ARE RECOGNISED AS EXPERTS IN 

THEIR FIELD, SO CUSTOMERS CAN 

BE CERTAIN OF THE QUALITY” 

the ability to multitask properly– are 

brought to the Mac with OS X. “Imagine 

how much more work you can get through 

a prepress department on a computer that 

doesn’t have to be restarted several times 

a day,” he comments, “or one which has 

the ability to rotate a large image in 

Adobe Photoshop in the background while 

working on a spread in QuarkXPress.” 

Apple’s new Unix power is also 

attracting the attention of server and 

workflow developers, most of whom had 

turned to Windows NT machines to handle 

tasks like RIPping, imposition or OPI in 

recent years. “Adobe has developed its 

CPSI RIP for OS X, which will reach the 

market via its OEM customers and Helios 

and XiNet have OS X native versions of 

key applications already,” Rogers adds. 

INDUSTRY VIEW Mark Rogers, Apple Computer 

Those working in graphics-intensive 

applications such as Photoshop should 

also gain an additional performance boost 

in Mac OS 10.2 (aka Jaguar) which offloads 

CPU work to supported graphics 

cards, through its Quartz Extreme technology. 

This can achieve between two and 

three-and-a-half fold improvements in 

various common screen drawing operations, 

and frees the CPU for other work. 

Then there’s ColorSync, Apple’s keystone 

colour management technology. 

A founder member of the International 

Colour Consortium, Apple developed 

ColorSync as an add-on capability to the 

old Mac OS, but now it’s an integral part 

of OS X, built in at system level. Rogers 

also points out Apple’s advantage in 

controlling both hardware and software at 

this level – “it’s the best quality assurance 

you can get for colour management.” 

Taking it to the people 

Following in the footsteps of the wellattended 

Mac OS X seminars held early 

this year, Apple is planning to more proactively 

market its messages for the 

graphic arts world through roadshows and 

seminars. Key to these events will be 

Apple Solution Experts, carefully vetted 

and accredited third parties who can 

provide support, training and consultancy 

to Apple customers in a range of specialist 

areas such as colour calibration, 

AppleScript programming, media asset 

management and database management. 

“We have set the bar high for the 

Apple Solution Expert programme,” Rogers 

expands. “We’re only appointing people 

who are recognised as experts in their 

field, so our customers can be very certain 

of the quality.” 

In addition to these Solution Experts, 

Apple is keen to work with other vendors 

and resellers to provide the whole package 

in a single customer visit: “That way the 

customer gets a complete solution, the 

reseller adds value and we get a better 

understanding of our customers.” 

For specialist companies serving the 

graphic arts market, the Apple initiative 

could add some welcome marketing 

muscle. “A lot of these consultancy and 

support operations tend to stay focused 

within their own customer bases,” says 

Rogers. “We hope to provide a catalyst 

and a mechanism to help them reach a 

broader audience through our marketing 

activities; if we can be that link, it makes a 

lot of sense.” ■ 


COLOUR MANAGEMENT profiling practicalities 

22 


Getting to grips with 

colour management 

THE THEORY’S FINE, BUT HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY DO COLOUR MANAGEMENT? WHERE DO YOU GET THE 

ICC PROFILES FROM AND WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IF THEY’RE MISSING? MICHAEL WALKER TAKES ADVICE. 

W 

e all want to get colour right. 

And we want it to be right 

everywhere. When it was one 

scan for one print job that 

wasn’t too hard to achieve, but now it’s 

one scan (or supplied image) for everything 

– print use and re-use on a variety 

of stocks in different publications, plus 

possible Web and other screen-based 

uses. Colour management is the only way 

to get consistent colour, but what do you 

actually need to do to implement it? 

The key to colour management based 

on ICC (International Colour Consortium) 

profiles is to have a profile for every 

device in the repro chain that can reproduce 

colour. The profile describes the 

colour behaviour of each device in such a 

way that its peculiarities can be accounted 

for when making design and production 

decisions. So that’s a profile each for the 

scanner (or digital camera), the monitor 

on which you view and edit images, the 

digital proofer and the eventual output 

device – typically but not necessarily an 

offset press. As we’ll see, in the real world, 

it might not be possible or absolutely 

necessary to have all of these, but let’s 

first look at how you acquire them. 

Repro quality flatbed scanners ship 

with default profiles which are usually 

specific to the model rather than the particular 

unit. Although this is a reasonable 

start, it’s better to profile your own 

scanner. To do this you scan a supplied 

transmission or reflection target and use 

profile-creating software such as Fujifilm’s 

ColourKit Profile Maker (available separately, 

though input profile creation capability 

for Fujifilm Lanovia Quattro scanners 

is included with the bundled version of 

ColourKit). This compares the measured 

colour values from the scan against the 

known values of the target and creates an 

input profile that you can then use with 

reflective or transparent originals respectively. 

A further refinement is to make 

profiles for different original types, particularly 

brands of transparency film, as 

each has its own colour characteristics. 

Screen test 

So much for profiling captured images. 

What about viewing them? Most good 

monitors ship with a supplied profile but 

CRT monitors are prone to drifting with 

age (and even during the day), so if you’re 

serious about getting accurate on-screen 

colour you’ll need to make your own 

monitor profile. 

Profiling monitors is a little more tricky 

and involves additional hardware, in the 

form of a colorimeter or spectrophotometer 

that attaches to or is suspended in 

front of the monitor. This measures the 

colour values as a series of test colours are 

displayed. Again, the displayed colours are 

compared to the reference colour values 

and a profile generated by the profile 

making software. The newer flatscreen 

LCD monitors such as Apple’s Studio 

Display range appear to be much more 

stable in their colour behaviour, but note 

that colour measuring devices for monitor 

calibration that attach by suction can 

distort these displays and produce invalid 

results. As well as making sure you choose 

profiling software that’s compatible with 

your system (most are designed to work 

with Macs; you might have more difficulty 

if you’re Windows-based), think about 

whether the associated hardware is going 

to cause problems like this. 

Who’s going to do it? 

At this point it’s worth pointing out that 

you don’t have to profile all your screens, 

only those on which colour adjustments 

are made, so don’t bother with systems 

that are used only for page layout. Also, 

you don’t necessarily have to buy all the 

colour measurement gear and do it your- 

COLOUR MANAGEMENT 

WITH FUJIFILM 

If you buy a Fujifilm scanner or digital 

proofer, this is what’s included. 

Finescan 2750 and 2750XL 

Both scanners ship with Fujifilm ColourKit 

for image editing, re-processing and SOOM 

(scan once output many, see p28) functions. 

Includes wide range of negative and transparency 

profiles for different film types plus 

many output profiles. Can import third-party 

ICC profiles and images. 

Lanovia Quattro 

Ships with ColourKit as above, but also 

includes a cut-down version of ProfileMaker 

to enable users to make custom input 

profiles for their own scanner. 

Pictro Proof 

Fujifilm’s high quality proofing system is 

driven by the GMG RIP. This uses a unique 

4-dimensional profile system and includes 

the tools to create and edit the profiles. 

Ready-made profiles are available to 

accurately simulate a wide variety of printing 

and proofing processes. 


COLOUR MANAGEMENT case study – GBM Group 

RGB suits GBM 

Manchester’s leading visual communications company is meeting exacting 

quality demands with a Fujifilm Lanovia Quattro scanner and ColourKit. 

“ColourKit Profile 

Maker is an excellent 

piece of software. 

We are amazed at its 

low cost.” 

Steve Wilks, imaging services manager, 

GBM Group 

B 

ecause of increasing workload at visual 

communication services company GBM, a 

new high quality scanner was needed to 

ensure that production for a range of clients 

could continue smoothly, but it was also 

necessary to have one that would fit into the 

RGB workflow that GBM uses. 

“We work in RGB because so many of the 

output routes that we support are RGB,” explains 

imaging services manager Steve Wilks. 

“Broadcast video, transparency, movies, Web 

sites and on-screen presentations all use RGB; it’s 

only print that needs CMYK.” 

The GBM workflow involves scanning to 

colour profiled RGB for output to a variety of 

devices that use different colour spaces – 

transparency film recorders (RGB), a large format 

Raster Graphics inkjet printer (CMYK), a Durst 

Lambda large format photographic printer (RGB, 

but not the same as for transparency output) and 

of course normal print repro (CMYK). It was 

important to get the best possible colour match 

across all these, so robust colour management 

was a key factor when looking at a new scanner. 

Fast and accurate 

The scanner that best fitted the bill was the 

Fujifilm Lanovia Quattro, offering the image 

24 Imaging 12 autumn 2002 

quality and productivity needed to meet GBM’s 

needs, together with the sophisticated 

capabilities of Fujifilm ColourKit for ICC profile 

creation, editing and colour space conversion. 

“Fujifilm’s ColourKit software was a key 

factor in our decision,” confirms Wilks. “We liked 

the technology, the way it worked. ColourKit 

Profile Maker is an excellent piece of software. 

We use it to create about 90 per cent of our 

profiles and are amazed at its low cost compared 

to the software we were using previously.” 

All the major in-house output devices listed 

above are profiled using ColourKit, as well as the 

Lanovia Quattro scanner. Colour-calibrated 

monitors and controlled colour temperature 

lighting are used in the creative and imaging 

studios to ensure consistency of results between 

output media. Staff at GBM scan originals to 

produce profiled RGB images; these are then 

converted in ColourKit or Adobe Photoshop 

using the appropriate output profiles to produce 

colour-managed files for output on each device. 

Any further tweaks required for a particular 

output instance will be done in that device’s 

colour space. This way the original master scan is 

preserved untouched so that any number of 

subsequent versions may be produced for output 

on any of the profiled devices. 

self, especially as profiling proofers is even 

more complex (see below). There are 

specialist consultants who can perform the 

profile creation task for you, leaving you 

with the profiles you will need. If you’re a 

small design firm or repro house with only 

a few monitors or proofers this might be 

the better route. For bigger agencies or 

repro facilities it may be more cost effective 

and convenient to buy the equipment 

and do the profile generation in-house; 

the ability to offer your customers ICC 

profiles for your output devices, whether 

proofers or presses, will increasingly be an 

advantage in winning new business. Offering 

profile-making services could even be 

an interesting new business opportunity. 

Another issue with monitor profiling is 

that to get any kind of accurate softproofing 

the monitor’s colour temperature 

needs to be set to 5500 K which makes 

‘white’ look like a dingy yellow. Although 

we’re used to the idea that the brilliant 

images we see on computer screens lose 

something by the time they make it into 

print, it’s still a bit of a shock to see that 

effect on screen. 

You don’t absolutely have to do this. 

Provided that you have a profiled proofer 

available on which to base accurate colour 

decisions you can choose to set your 

monitor as you prefer it; providing you 

don’t keep changing it, you’ll get used to 

the difference between screen and proof 

and be able to make allowances while 

working on screen, in much the same way 

that we all got used to the difference 

between Cromalins and the final print. 

There is also the view that screen-based 

soft proofing can’t be completely reliable 

because screens emit light while proofs 

and printed pages reflect it (and of course, 

viewing conditions affect both, though not 

necessarily in the same way). 

Proofers and presses 

This is where profile generation gets quite 

a bit more difficult. From a supplied file 

you have to print out a test sheet on your 

proofer. For press profiling, the plates 

have to be made via film output or CTP, 

whichever you intend to use. Your film- or 

platesetter will need to be properly 

calibrated (and kept that way) and your 

processing needs to be within proper 

tolerances as well. Then you print the job 

on the machine you want to profile. 

Once you’ve made your test prints 

you’ll need a spectrophotometer to 

measure the results and feed them into

RAISE YOUR PROFILE 

Here’s quick guide to software and 

hardware for creating colour profiles. 

Fujifilm ColourKit 

Scanning and colour correction 

software available for Windows and 

Macintosh (OS 9 and OS X). Enables 

the user to select output profiles and 

embed them into images, at the time of 

scanning or later. The image refreshes 

on screen to show the effect of the 

selected profile. Includes many generic 

and device-specific input and output 

profiles for transparency, negative and 

reflection originals and accepts ICCcompliant 

third party profiles. 

Fujifilm ProfileMaker 

Software for producing input, output 

and monitor profiles. ICC compliant. 

Includes all necessary colour targets 

and look up tables, but no spectro- 

the profiling software for comparison 

against ideal values. Since this can involve 

up to 600 spot measurements you should 

consider whether it’s worth investing in an 

automated spectrophotometer to avoid 

the tedium and likely errors in taking that 

many measurements manually. Only 

printers, or large agencies or repro firms 

doing demanding advertising work would 

find it worth buying a device of this type. 

When profiling digital proofers you 

need to keep an eye on the stock being 

used. High end proofers like Fujifilm’s 

Pictro Proof use only dedicated stock 

that’s manufactured to tight tolerances, 

but you can put almost anything in an 

inkjet, so it’s important to standardise on 

your stock for a profiled proofer. The 

colour and texture of the paper can even 

make colours that measure the same look 

different to the eye. The more expensive 

dedicated papers from reputable manufacturers 

should provide a good level of 

consistency from batch to batch. 

There is also an option to profile the 

proofer to match known analogue proof 

characteristics such as Cromalins, as this 

tends to be a more reliable target than the 

photometer. Total ink weights and black 

generation can be specified when 

making new profiles. Profiles can be 

edited. 

OTHER VENDORS 

Most manufacturers can supply both 

hardware and software for monitor 

calibration, input and output profile 

creation, plate reading and ink weight 

checks. Prices vary, and it’s worth 

checking that the profiles made are ICC 

compliant. If not, it may be impossible 

to import them into other programs 

and their use will be limited. 

Pantone Colorvision range 

ProfilePRO provides the means to 

create and edit RGB and CMYK printer 

profiles within Photoshop. No spectrophotometer 

supplied, but compatible 

with all common models. 

press itself and there is plenty of industry 

experience in working from proofs of this 

type. Note, however, that some products 

designed to do this, such as GMG’s 

ColorProof software, do not work with ICC 

profiles and take a proprietary approach. 

THE ABILITY TO OFFER YOUR CUSTOMERS ICC PROFILES 

FOR YOUR OUTPUT DEVICES WILL INCREASINGLY BE AN 

ADVANTAGE IN WINNING NEW BUSINESS 

On the press side, there are even more 

variables. As well as maintaining tight 

control through every stage of the platemaking 

process, press conditions should 

be kept as consistent as possible. Usually 

this means running to fixed ink weights, 

but as press minders know all too well, 

uncontrollable variables such as humidity 

and temperature can interfere. Experience 

has shown that there can be more variation 

in the behaviour of a particular press 

than between different units of the same 

model at different sites. 

Then there’s the stock itself. Clearly 

newsprint is going to have quite different 

characteristics to a bright white coated 

paper. Ideally you would profile the press 

and paper combination that you intend to 

use. In reality this is probably only worth 

doing for large regular colour-critical jobs, 

or newspapers, so what should you do if 

you’re a jobbing printer who might be 

PhotoCAL and OptiCAL use Pantone’s 

Spyder colorimeter to create and 

manipulate monitor profiles. 

ProfilePLUS allows you to use your 

scanner to create and edit RGB and 

CMYK printer profiles. Requires a 

PostScript colour printer. Profiles will 

only be as good as your scanner. 

Imaging Technologies ColorBlind 

ColorBlind creates profiles for all image 

capture and output devices. Available 

in various different configurations, it 

includes black generation and independent 

GCR for colour and grey plus 

advanced highlight and shadow ink 

limit controls. No spectrophotometer 

supplied, but compatible with most 

models. 

churning out leaflets for the local boot 

sale one day and glossy brochures with 

five colours and spot varnish the next? 

If and when to colour manage 

There is a strong argument that for less 

discerning jobs, the time and cost involved 

in profiling the press cannot be justified 

and that printers should ask to be supplied 

with jobs containing images that are 

already converted to CMYK using a suitable 

standard output profile; there are 

generic CMYK output profiles that follow 

the Euroscale and SWOP standards for 

coated and uncoated stocks that can be 

used for this. The printer can then adjust 

on-press if necessary. The danger is in 

mixing colour managed and non colour 

managed work on the same press – if you 

tweaked the press for a non-CM job, it’ll 

then be wrong for one that is managed, as 

the process depends on the press running 

to fixed parameters. 

Once you’ve made, selected or 

acquired profiles for everything in the 

repro chain you’re ready to make the next 

decision – when to perform the colour 

transformations that turn your input 

colour into output colour. We’ll look at 

that, how to handle images that arrive 

without profiles and what to do with the 

Photoshop “colour profile that does not 

match the current working space” message 

in the next issue. ■ 

Gretag 

Spectroscan is a fully automatic tablemounted 

spectrophotometer capable of 

measuring large numbers of colour 

patches without operator intervention. 

Film and transparency options are 

available as well as reflection models. 

The scanning head can be detached 

and used for monitor calibration. 

Eye-One is a complete system comprising 

software and spectrophotometer. 

Available in various configurations, it 

provides monitor profiling, colour 

measurement and creation of profiles. 

X-Rite 

X-Rite offers a full range of spectrophotometers 

and plate-readers. The 

DTP41 Autoscan spectrophotometer 

reads 480 colours in around five 

minutes on virtually any paper stock. 


25

SCANNING understanding the basics 

Is scanning sorted? 

HIGH-END FLATBED SCANNERS THESE DAYS COME WITH SOFTWARE THAT PROMISES TO 

AUTOMATE JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE CHOICE OF ORIGINAL. MICHAEL WALKER 

LIFTS THE LID TO FIND OUT IF IT’S REALLY THAT EASY. 

26 


I 

n the last few years scanning 

has undergone a radical 

transformation, from closelyguarded 

black art with 

lengthy apprenticeships, hugely expensive 

machinery and inscrutable operators 

whose pronouncements could not be 

contradicted, to a demystified everyday 

activity for users in the design and print 

mainstream. Current high-end flatbed 

scanners now claim quality to rival – or at 

least get within spitting distance of – their 

behemoth drum ancestors, together with 

convenience and highly automated software 

that does away with the need for 

highly-trained and expensive operators. 

At least, that’s how the marketing 

goes. But if you’re thinking of getting a 

high quality flatbed scanner can you really 

just mount the originals, adjust a few 

simple settings, press ‘scan’ and leave 

everything to the software? 

Let there be light 

According to Fujifilm Graphic Systems’ 

scanner demonstrator Peter Virgo the 

answer these days is usually yes. One 

reason for his confidence is that unlike the 

drum scanner operators of yesteryear, 

today’s flatbed users can literally see what 

they’re doing. With a properly colour managed 

set-up, you can see what you’re 

going to get, if not necessarily on a screen 

(see page 23) then certainly on a good 

quality digital proof. 

That brings us to the other reason why 

scanning has become so much simpler – 

the software has been developed to 

encapsulate years of operators’ experience 

but allows you to make adjustments based 

on easily understandable visual concepts 

such as ‘light original’ or ‘enhance shadow 

detail’. Exactly which optical or digital 

scanning parameters are being adjusted 

when you select these you probably don’t 

need to know in 90 per cent of cases. 

With modern scanner software you also 

get the ability play with a variety of the 

parameters independently to gauge the 

optimum result – the drum scanner 

operator used to have to do it all in one 

go, balancing the different requirements in 

his head as he decided what settings were 

needed. By contrast, scanning software 

and image editing programs such as 

Adobe Photoshop allow a wide range of 

adjustments for both aesthetic and 

production-related purposes. 

In the absence of any other 

instructions the standing brief for the 

drum scanner operator was always to get 

the best match to the original, but since 

the result couldn’t be seen until much 

later in the production process (unless 

scatter proofs were made immediately) 

they were working blind and had to learn 

to tell by eye which settings would need 

adjusting for a particular type of original. 

Nowadays by comparison, “with the right 

hardware and software any competent 

operator with an eye for colour should be 

able to get a reasonable quality scan, a 

good facsimile of the original,” according 

to Virgo. 

Certain operations such as scaling, 

basic colour correction and unsharp 

masking (USM) are still better performed 

by scanning software at the time of 

scanning (or when preparing an outputspecific 

image, see ‘See you SOOM’ panel) 

than as adjustments or corrections after 

the event, says Fujifilm’s Virgo, though 

noting that the ‘garbage in garbage out’ 

principle still applies – “a poor original still 

can’t give you a good result.” 

With that in mind, it’s still useful to 

have a basic grasp of the things that go 

on during the scanning process so that 

you can get the best out of difficult or 

unusual originals. 

Look sharp 

Unsharp masking (USM) algorithms are 

designed to improve the apparent sharpness 

of scanned images without producing 

“ANY COMPETENT MAC OPERATOR SHOULD BE ABLE 

TO GET A REASONABLE QUALITY SCAN THAT IS A 

GOOD FACSIMILE OF THE ORIGINAL” 

the sort of grainy or speckly artifacts that 

Photoshop’s sharpen filter does. The 

process involves analysing the content of 

the image to detect areas of high contrast 

(typically the edges of objects) and add a 

contrasting ‘halo’ on either side of the 

boundary to increase the perceived sharpness 

in the final screened image. USM has 

been a feature of digital scanning since its 

inception (and itself mimics an analogue 

process) so as you might expect, vendors 

with a background in top quality drum 

scanning place a lot of stock in the quality 

of their sharpening algorithms. 

Some vendors’ software performs the 

USM operation as part of the scan, so it’s 

important to get it right. Most scanning 

software lets you preview the sharpening 

effect, a benefit that drum scanner 

operators didn’t have, but treat this with 

caution, as an effect that looks extreme 

when viewing a file on-screen at 100 per 

cent may be inadequate when the image is 

screened and printed. Bear in mind also 

that sharpening can’t rescue an out-offocus 

photograph – you might get a small 

improvement, but if you push it too far all 

that will happen is that you’ll start 

enhancing the film grain instead. 

It’s probably best to start with the 

default settings and only adjust for 

difficult originals – original art such as 

watercolour paintings, soft pencil or 

charcoal sketches, for example, could 

bring up the texture of the paper too 

much or exaggerate the graininess of the 

strokes. In reproducing original art of this 

kind there are usually aesthetic decisions 

to be made as well as production ones – is 

the colour and texture of the paper part of 

the work or not? Your scanning software 

WHY GET A HIGH-END 

FLATBED? 

With flatbed scanners from office equipment 

vendors available for under £100 and 

apparently capable of scanning reflection 

and transparent originals, the question 

‘why spends thousands of pounds?’ is more 

pertinent than ever. 

It’s long been true that the quality of 

image yielded by a scanner is as much 

dependent on the software as the optics, 

which is why buying a scanner from a 

vendor with a background in professional 

colour repro is more likely to get you good 

software. This is crucial in a range of 

factors that directly affect image quality, 

from interpolated resolution (for enlargements 

that exceed the optical limits of the 

system) to unsharp masking. You’re also 

more likely to find proper colour management 

(including profile creation and editing 

tools) and additional capabilities such as 

de-screening or copydot scanning. 

On the hardware side, high-end 

flatbeds have better quality optics and 

CCDs, better engineered mechanisms – for 

both precision and longevity – and a 

variety of productivity features from faster 

scanning to large format (A3 or greater) 

originals support and batch scanning. 


SCANNING case study – Triangle Print, Northcliffe Newspapers Group 

Quattro wins scanning Derby 

Northcliffe midlands newspapers are using a 

Fujifilm Lanovia Quattro scanner for speed 

and quality. 

“The Fujifilm flatbeds 

are as good as our 

old drum scanner.” 

Paul Kilminster, deputy systems 

imaging manager, Triangle Print 

28 

roducing the Derby Evening Telegraph and the 

Nottingham Evening Post city newspapers plus the 

P monthly colour magazine Derbyshire Now, with colour 

in all three, meant a requirement for both repro quality 

and throughput in the editorial production department at 

Northcliffe’s Derby Evening Telegraph site. 

A Fujifilm Lanovia C-550 scanner installed at the Derbybased 

Triangle Print subsidiary in early 1999 for normal 

scanning and copydot work had proved itself to be ‘more than 

acceptable’ in terms of quality and productivity according to 

regional systems imaging manager Nick Preston, so when a 

new scanner was needed to replace an older drum unit, it was 

logical to look at the new Fujifilm models. 

After a demonstration of ColourKit at Ipex 2002 Preston 

and his deputy Paul Kilminster confirmed their order for a 

Fujifilm Lanovia Quattro scanner. The unit was delivered the 

following month and after a swift and trouble-free installation 

was up and running. 

“We were impressed with the original Lanovia we bought,” 

commented Paul Kilminster, “and the Quattro has even better 

software in ColourKit and is easier to use. The Fujifilm flatbeds 

are as good as our old drum scanner.” 

Scanner operators have noticed that in addition to 

producing sharper images, the scanning time is significantly 

reduced on the Quattro. Although most images are scanned 

from colour print – virtually everything is now shot on colour 

negative by staff photographers – typically hundreds of 

images have to be scanned each day, so the extra productivity 

is essential. 


may have a ‘set paper to white’ option 

that will automatically lose the paper 

colour but the result might be less visually 

pleasing than allowing some tone into the 

blank areas. 

The dynamic duo – 

UCR and GCR 

Two acronyms that can strike fear into the 

hearts of inexperienced scanner operators 

are UCR (under colour removal) and GCR 

(grey component replacement). The 

former removes cyan, magenta and yellow 

from black or heavy shadow areas in order 

to limit ink coverage. This is typically used 

in newspapers or any other high volume/ 

high speed printing on thin stock where 

drying time is critical. 

GCR applies the same principle – 

replacing equal proportions of cyan, 

magenta and yellow with an equivalent 

percentage of black – across the entire 

image, again to limit ink usage which 

saves both money (black ink is still 

cheaper) and drying time. 

The good news is that in an ICC-based 

colour workflow both these parameters 

can be built into the output profile, so for 

regular repeating newspaper or catalogue 

work it should only be necessary to obtain 

the correct profile (see also article on 

colour management in this issue, page 22) 

and then designers can safely work on the 

image within the constraints of the output 

process. If you have to produce the 

occasional one-off scan for newspaper use 

and an ICC profile isn’t available or appropriate, 

the target publications should be 

able to supply you with UCR/GCR specifications 

that can be entered via your 

scanning software or in Photoshop and 

used to create a suitable CMYK image. 

Feeling negative? 

Scanning from colour negatives was 

always the bugbear of professional repro 

houses. Usually drum scanner operators 

would prefer to scan from a print, as it 

gave them an ‘original’ to match. While 

this benefit still applies (and Fujifilm’s 

Peter Virgo opines that colour transparency 

is still the better medium), 

‘intelligent’ scanning of negatives has 

come a long way recently towards overcoming 

the inherent variability in colour 

negative stocks and the effects of 

different processing. 

Good scanning software should be able 

to analyse a negative and produce an 

acceptable scan with minimal intervention. 

Fujifilm’s ColourKit embodies the negative 

scanning expertise from the company’s 

professional photographic roots and can 

analyse negatives for under- or overexposure, 

detect the presence of flesh 

tones and adjust colour balance and 

density settings accordingly. While it’s 

always preferable to have a good reference 

to scan to, capabilities like these take 

most of the guesswork out of scanning 

orphaned negs, leaving only minor tweaks 

to be made by eye. 

From print to print 

Sometimes you’re faced with an original 

that’s a screened and printed image, or 

perhaps you’re presented with a set of film 

separations and told to get on with it. 

Don’t panic, once again current software 

should cover this. De-screening of printed 

originals and copydot scanning of separations 

aren’t new ideas by any means, but 

what used to be fairly esoteric and special- 

SEE YOU SOOM 

It’s always best to scan for the specific 

output instance, but in today’s multiple 

media repurposable environment that’s not 

always desirable or even possible. Hence 

the evolution of Scan Once Output Many 

(SOOM), a scanning workflow that aims to 

separate as many output-specific parameters 

(image size, colour space, screen/ 

resolution, etc) from the raw image data as 

possible so that the same initial scan can be 

used to generate a host of daughter 

variants to suit the widest range of output 

circumstances, from glossy magazines to 

newspapers, brochures to Web sites. 

Ideally a SOOM setup will apply all 

output-specific calculations, such as 

resampling, sharpening, ICC profile-based 

colour transformations (including UCR/GCR 

and any other reproduction-related colour 

correction) when the specific daughter file 

is generated, leaving the original data 

untouched. Products from different vendors 

achieve this to a greater or lesser degree. 

Fujifilm’s ColourKit uses a nondestructive 

editing technique that stores all 

image alterations in a profile, including 

scaling, sharpening and even the modulation 

transfer function of the scanning 

device, which is used in conjunction with 

sharpening and scaling routines to produce 

optimised results from photomultiplier 

(drum) scanners or CCD (flatbed) devices. 

However many output-specific images are 

generated, the original raw scan data is 

preserved to maximise quality.

ist applications are now included as part of 

the standard suite of tools with good 

flatbed scanners. 

Copydot is a special case of line art 

scanning and here too improvements in 

software have removed much of the 

guesswork. The ability to preview small 

areas of the image at high magnification 

allows fine-tuning of scanning parameters 

without having to make a complete (and 

possibly lengthy) scan first – you can 

check whether fine serifs on type are 

being captured cleanly, for example. An 

additional ability in scanning software 

such as Fujifilm’s ColourKit is that of 

colour separating coloured line art involving 

flat tints, as found in company logos. 

Push the button and relax 

The problem for many drum-trained 

scanner operators is to step back and let 

the software do its stuff: “They try to go 

in too deep, and can’t bring themselves to 

relinquish manual control,” says Peter 

Virgo. For the rest of us, it’s a relief that 

it’s not necessary to have to play with 

these settings to get a good result most of 

the time. With the right scanner and 

software, everyone should get what they 

need – easy to use, productive highquality 

scanning for the vast majority of 

work, plus the special options and flexible 

control for unusual applications or difficult 

originals. It seems that scanning is just 

about sorted. ■ 

Fine art makes fine scans 

A leading fine art gallery is using a Fujifilm FineScan 2750 and Pictrography 

printer to make high quality reproductions to send to discerning collectors. 

T 

he world’s largest general fine art 

gallery, Richard Green has a reputation 

for offering only the highest quality 

paintings. With such an emphasis on 

quality, studio manager Peter Brady was looking for 

ways to present to prospective purchasers the best 

possible reproductions of works that sell for millions. 

For some years he had been sending out duplicate 10 

x 8-inch transparencies but was doubtful if they were 

being viewed under the same strictly controlled 

lighting conditions as in the studio. 

Having bought a low-cost flatbed scanner for 

picture databasing purposes, Brady began to 

experiment with inkjet prints as a means of producing 

hardcopy output. This led to the purchase of a 

Fujifilm Pictrography digital printer. 

Because it uses photographic paper, the prints 

look and feel like conventional photographs which 

Brady feels is important in establishing customers’ 

confidence. “The Pictrography prints are more 

realistic, without the exaggerated dynamic range and 

‘sparkle’ of transparencies,” he says. 

Having a high quality output device led to a reexamination 

of the image input side of the equation. 

A more expensive model from the manufacturer of 

the original flatbed unit was tried but rejected in 

SCANNING case study – Richard Green 

“The FineScan 2750 was 

sharper, more accurate 

and more neutral.” 

Peter Brady, studio manager, Richard Green 

favour of the Fujifilm FineScan 2750. “We thought 

that what we were getting was good,” comments 

Brady, “but there was a jump in quality with the 

FineScan 2750, a vast improvement. It was sharper, 

more accurate and more neutral.” 

As a test of the scanner and Pictrography 

combination, Brady compared his prints against 

proofs made by a printer using a high-end drum 

scanner with an experienced operator making digital 

proofs and comparing both against the originals. “It 

was like watching Coe and Ovett competing,” he 

recalls, “about half of the time my prints were closer 

to the original, and about half the time the printer’s 

proofs were closer.” 

The FineScan hasn’t yet been used to provide 

images for conventional CMYK print, but recent tests 

Brady has run have impressed him. “We’ve more or 

less cracked it right away,” he reports. 

The ability to send out such high quality reproductions 

means that customers can have confidence 

in what they’re seeing. “They have accepted the 

prints quickly, no one asks for transparencies now. So 

much so that we only took Pictrography prints with 

us to the Biennale art show in Paris recently and 

customers were prepared to buy paintings after 

seeing only the prints,” says Brady. 


REVIEW graphics in India 

Indian summer 

THE DIVERSITY AND INVENTION OF INDIAN COMMERCIAL GRAPHICS 

ARE REFLECTED IN A NEW BOOK. 

iven the current popularity of 

all things Indian in the 

entertainment world, from 

The Kumars at no 42 to 

Bollywood-inspired musicals on the West 

End stage, it’s both timely and illuminating 

to find a book about commercial art in the 

sub-continent. 

Written and designed by Keith 

Lovegrove and photographed by Andrew 

Hasson, Graphicswallah covers the gamut 

of Indian graphics from enamel street 

signs to political posters, humble shopfronts 

to huge hoardings for the latest 

cinema releases. As with many other 

aspects of India, it presents an intriguing 

mix of ancient and modern – high 

powered ad agencies in ultra modern 

premises in Mumbai churn out Photoshop 

work to match the West, while the handpainted 

figures and letters in film posters 

are an accepted art form in their own 

30 

G 


right, with some celebrated masters crossing 

into the ‘real’ art world. 

While posters for major cinema releases 

are painted in studios – with apprentices 

of ascending experience and seniority 

laying down a grid, sketching charcoal 

outlines and painting backgrounds before 

the master artist paints the faces – other 

types of advertisement tend to be painted 

in situ, on canvas, vinyl, wood or even 

sheet metal hoardings. Working from 

postcard-sized originals, a team of 

hoarding painters can produce a major 

piece equivalent to a Western 48-sheet 

poster in two or three days. 

Those fed up with corporate sponsorship 

in the West would do well to take a 

look at some of rural villages in the state 

of Tamil Nadu where every house is 

painted with the Ramco Cement logo – 

the product might not be used in the 

houses, but it’s certainly all over them. ■ 

Graphicswallah: Graphics in India will be published 

in Spring 2003 by Laurence King Publishing. 

Andrew Hasson can be reached on 01273 557965, 

www.andrewhasson.btinternet.co.uk.


Fuji Photo Film (UK) Limited 

Graphic Systems Imaging Centre 

Unit 15, St Martin’s Way 

St Martin’s Business Centre 

Bedford mk42 0lf 

United Kingdom 

Phone +44 (0)1234 245245 

Fax +44 (0)1234 245345 

e-mail marketing.fgs@fuji.co.uk

Imaging 12 - Fujifilm Graphic Systems

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