New to the site? Post your intro here and be welcomed...

[bigg_MARK]

Howdy all!

I'm Mark Rogalski from Now Impressions, Puget Sound Envelope, and Label Masters Inc. art department here in Redmond WA.

I've been doing prepress for all three companies here since June of 1999. I received my certificate for Desktop Publishing from the Art Institue of Seattle in 1994 (for what thats worth :roll: ) and was a Cake Sculptor in between time.

We are all sister companies and are wholesale printers, that means we do printing for various independant or corporate brokers, we have very little contact with the end user (thank god). We mostly do spot color work as well as some 4cp on the envelope Jet and a Ryobi twin tower press.

My job mostly consists of fixing the crap I get from the designers, making it separate and imposing it on sheets if it goes flat.
We have a CTP processor as well as an old reliable ECRM VRL36 imagesetter for the jobs that must go metal.

Our bread and butter is continuous checks and flexo label printing.

I enjoy my job and most of my co-workers, while lots of mom and pop shops have bit the dust since 911 we've managed to stay afloat and pick up the slack.

I am very well versed in single page production as well as PDF-inDesign workflows for Harlequin RIP on a Mitsubishi ECCO 1630. We've had it since Jan 10 2000 and it has made my job a crucial part of our production (Job security).

I am coming to this site via the Macaddict forums where I found a link here, glad I found it!

I hope to learn some other things here, like large scale print production methods as well as just seeing / reading about what is going on in general out in the Larger world of prepress that I am sure I am sheltered from here in my safe little art department.

My favorite tools are listed in order from top to bottom:

#1 1.25 Dual Proc Mirror Door G4 Mac (OS X.4.3, 1 GIG RAM)
#2 Indesign CS/CS2
#3 Pitstop
#4 lllustrator CS/CS2
#5 Photoshop CS2
#6 Freehand MX

I can work magic with those programs.

Programs I hate.

#1 Pagemaker (all)
#2 Publisher
#3 Word
#4 Quark (all)

Our presses include:
2 Heath continuous
2 3" Halm Jet presses
2 6" Halm Jet presses
1 4cp Jet press 9not sure of manufacturer, it's kind of a POS but gets the job done
2 AB dick 9800 presses
1 Heidelburg "Kluge" presses
1 big ass Kod press
2 Flexo presses, each with 4 stations.

We do alot of small stuff here, my job is fairly simple and I love it!

Well see you cats on the board!

Bigg_Mark

[prepress_brillance_43]

...sounds like you guys have it going on. Welcome to the prepress board of choice. Feel free to pull up a chair, kick your shoes off, and get comfy.


..hey keep, can we get this man a beer. 8)

[Earendil]

Hello PPFers, pleased to meet you all, my name is Jeremy and I run the prepress at Valley Web Printing. We are a medium sized shop with a 2web Heatset, a newspaper press capable of pulling 5webs, and a couple of 19x25ish sheetfeds. Up front we use a Xenith Xitron Workflow to feed a Screen PTR8000. We use an Epson 10600 and a HP5500 Doubleproof for proofing. For workstations we have a Dual2.0 G5(mine), Dual1.8 G5, Single 1.8 G5, some OS9 G3s and G4s along with a dual 2800 Athlon WinXP, for whoever is being naughty that day.

I started in the bindery 15 years ago as a temp job right out of high school and have nosed my way through running presses, traditional stripping and finally ended up chained to a cpu.

I live in Eagle Point Oregon and right now there is a monster storm dumping killer ammounts of powder on Mt. Ashland just for me! I have 3 boys under the age of 7 and a wife that I adore.

Thanks for all the humor and advice, that tip about the broadband optimizer changed my life.

Cheers!

[Fmoser]

Hi All,

I'm Brenden and I work for Compose Systems Hong Kong as a Prepress Technical Support guy, I have worked in prepress since 1987.

I am originally from Sydney Australia where I started life as an apprentice film planner/platemaker. After a few years bent over the light table sticking black plastic to clear plastic I was introduced to a Mac and the digital world of prepress.

Like most prepress slaves I have worked for many print shops and many different prepress systems such as: Scitex, Screen, Delta and Prinergy etc outputting to both film/plate setters and digital proofers.

In 2002 I moved to HK and picked up a job with Compose which has me travelling around Asia doing installs, training and tech support.

I joined PPF about 6 months ago and I reckon it?s great. I often find myself digging around old posts looking for ideas or answers to some of problems I come up against.

Well done on a great site guys!

Cheers
Brenden

[prepress_brillance_43]

pretty interesting sounding job you got yourself there Brenden. Welcome to PPF.

[Nellster]

Hi all. I am Neil Thompson and I work in middlesex in the UK.
Started off life as a platen boy at the age of fifteen. Done years of bench planning and platemaking. Made the move to dtp with an ancient mac and very little knowledge. Produced film for years with a few different imagesetters and still do to this day. Should be moving over to ctp in march/april.

Go easy on me fellas, I bruise easily

Nellster.

[Joe]

Welcome Nellster. There is a lot of great info here. The people here have saved me from myself more than once.

[Sparky]

Welcome Nellster, as you gain more insight into this trade and move up on the technology ladder there are a lot of folks here who, despite the crazy ramblings and intoxicated babbling, do know quite a bit about prepress. I even try to sound off occasionally and try not to put my foot too far in my mouth :roll:

But kick back and enjoy your stay with PPF, and when you get down or confused ask or rant, that's what we're here for. :wink:

[pierre]

Hi everyone!
My name is Pierre, I started in this business right out of highschool Jan. 1978 at a newspaper shooting lineshots, halftones then stripping and plate making. I also ran the press in the afternoons a
5- unit Goss Community web press.

From there I went to work for a service bureau where I learned to seperate color on a process camera shooting continous tone negitives
and went on to scanning, a crosfield 510,640,645 the 510 didn"t generate
dots so you had to load screens of the correct lpi and angle. I also learned proofing cromlins, naps, colorkeys and matchprints. That lasted two years.

After that ran its coarse I went to work for another service bureau as a scanner operator with better scanners a Hell 300 B a Hell 340 and finally a 3010. I was at this company from 1986 until it closed
July 2004 While working for this company I did alot of retouching, outlining, ripping and trapping files.

After we closed I got the 3010 and was able to install it at the printing company where I am laid off from at this writing.


I think its time to move on to something else. I've had fun and learned alittle bit about many things in this industry, seen alot of changes
most of them good, as have many of you guys that have been in it as long as I have.

This is an excellent web site thanks to all that contibute.

Pierre

[David]

Welcome to PPF Pierre!

sorry to hear you're out of work. Just hang out here till you get something going, have some laughs, and maybe something will pop up here that suits you!

Cheers,
David