Flattening Issues Preflight Help!

[zpeters01]

Hi there, im new to this site, and have been doing digital prepress 6 months for a small printing company here in Minneapolis. I was wondering what you people use to preflight flattening issues. I was just having a problem today where an image was showing up on screen with the proper transparency with the overprint preview off as well. Well when I send it to the Digital Press it still prints out a white box around the image that should be transparent. We only received PDF Files so I cant try reflattening out the native document. We really dont use any preflight software here, but I was wondering anybody might have any ideas of software that could check for any problems with that? I just tried converting the doc to CMYK (there were 3 spot colors in the document) Im sending to the press to see if that resolves it, but im not sure if that will work unless I convert it in the native format before flattening. Well anyways just wondered what you pros do about this issue.

[mattbeals]

You need to have overprint preview on first of all. There's really no way to preview what will happen when flattening transparency. You can use the transparency flattener to see what objects have transparency or will be affected by th flattening process. But you can't test and preview settings. Make sure you have perserve overprint appearance turned on when flattening. Set the gradient mesh to between 300 and 400 dpi depending on your image resolution preference. Vector/lineart typically should be at 1200 or 1270 depending your imaging resolution.

[seetomtype]

Welcome to the forum!

You could try placing the PDF into Indesign and Exporting a new PDF that has Acrobat 4
compatability. Or place in InDesign and rip it from there using the Simulate Overprint
option in the print dialog box. You might also try to Pint To File out of Acrobat and Distill the
resulting .ps file. That will force flattening. There are a number of work arounds that could
be tried.

What digital press and rip are you using?

edit: That darn Matt's pretty quick isn't he?

[zpeters01]

Thanx for the info guys. I guess I got it to work after, the problem was that I received 2 pdfs totally at wrong size and had to place them into indesign then reprinted through the acrobat distiller. When I did that the spot colors in the files threw everything out of wack the transparent image now had a white background., I tried converting the document to cmyk after I printed and it messed up all the colors and still didnt quite work with the transparency. I shouldve thought to try converting the original pdfs to CMYK before I printed through Indesign, That solved all my problems. But yeah im still a bit new to all this preflighting and getting used to all the tools in acrobat so I didnt think to check out the flattener I will look into that. In our shop we have 2 Kodak Nexpress 2100s with their standard Nexpress Frontend. So I just drop my PDFs when im finished with them onto the server and it takes care of the RIP from there. But anyways thanx for the tips I will have to experiment with some of your suggestions.

[The_Stevinator]

try acrobats "preflight" function. you can check for white overprints that way, or if you have the means, flightcheck professional is a good tool.

[zoegirl2003]

We use a Nexpress and I print these kinds of files from inDesign using Convert to RGB (when I have pantone colors) or CMYK (when using process colors) and simulate overprint checked. Anything with shadows produced in Illustrator or inDesign and some types of clipping pathes.

I have found you can also reprint the files from the Nexpress frontend and fix the problem in some cases.

I talked to Kodak about this issue and they blame Adobe for the flattening. With that said...I don't have the same problems with flattening when printing from.

[zimmy]

You can flatten your PDFs in Acrobat.

[zoegirl2003]

That almost never works when printing to the Nexpress.

[zpeters01]

So do you have as many problems with transparencies and spot colors as I do zoegirl? Ive pretty much started converting everything thats has PMS and transparencies to cmyk before I do anything to avoid that problem. You work in RGB with PMS? thats kind of interesting.

[mrseang]

When you can get away with it, I've used "print as image" outa acrobat as a quick fix. Convert all spots to process and simulate overprint out of Indy has worked for me in some cases too.