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Hi Cari, Unfortunately it's not that easy. I work for an extraordinarily large company (biggest in the world for our line of business) who has been doing things this way for years before I came around and successfully I might add. I've had plenty of suggestions as to how we can improve the workflow but there are limitations to what we can do for a few main reason.
First, we can't tell the creative departments how to do their jobs and what formats to use to do it. We do make suggestions though which are largely ignored. They don't care how easy it is for us in premedia as long as they can create in their own way. If you ask them it's up to us to make it work..... not exactly the greatest teamwork.
Secondly, this department and the workflow here were created by a prepress mastermind (not just by this site's standards, but a real bigwig in the industry). With that being said, things do work perfectly 99% of the time with how things are now. Having an occasional bizarre problem really doesn't warrant a workflow overhaul. Though I can agree that things need a bit of an update (and it's being done slowly but surely) we are too large to just change how we do things on the spot. Not only that but our prepress wizard also has quite an ego and getting someone with 30 or so years of experience to change things based on what a guy under 30 says isn't easy.
Lastly, as far as the formats we use. I agree that we should use .AI over an .eps but managment has their reasons and like I said, it usually works no problem. And we have millions of images as .EPS from over the years and updating them all would be insane. PSDs would be great but most of our work is still done in Quark v4-v6 so a TIF is preferred because the PSD won't work in Quark. They've really shyed away from most forms of PDF so far as well although we are starting to work in that direction.
On to the next thing. We have to flatten up front before we rip because our rip can't handle live tranparencies. We currently use Nexus 7.5 (ps 3)and the only way to get it work with transparencies is to either flatten the image before you rip it or use an OPI workflow (for drop shadows) which we use for Quark because it can't handle native transparencies. Much of this will go away with Quark 7 and our inevitable upgrade to Nexus 8 which can handle live transparencies and blending modes.
I agree that resizing in InDesign shouldn't cause these problems. But, it's not our workflow or the formats we're using either. I've tried everything under the sun that I could think of including changing and replacing the image as a Photoshop PDF, PSD, AI, EPS etc. None of it works. It's just a weird anomaly. It simply doesn't like being the size it is where it is. I can make it smaller or larger in the same spot and it works. I can keep it same size and move it and it works...... just not where it is at the size it is. For now we used our last effort workaround and rasterized the whole damned thing and ripped it out of Quark which worked. Next step is to involve Adobe and Artwork Systems (Nexus) and find out why this is happening because there is no logical explanation for it on our end.
I'm sorry if I'm sounding like a jerk but the whole process has annoyed me, I'm tired, I'm getting a migraine and I'm having a really bad day. I really do appreciate your input, Cari
Oh, Sparky, I just saw your post now. I did try that too and unfortunately it didn't get me anywhere. It's a great idea though. Thanks!
~Soilworker
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