Black First or Last?

[sequoia]

(This was originally posted in the prepress forum, but it's been suggested that I should have put it in here. More responses are available there.)

We print black first, here at the print shop where I work, on multi-color, mulit-head press jobs. Apparently, this helps with the drying of the ink. The local ink supplier has everyone in this mid-sized city printing this way. Obviously, this is the opposite of what every novice prepress person has been schooled to expect, as well as the opposite of the way all software deals with black by default. I'm finding I have to tell black to quit overprinting, which is only a little less unnerving than driving through a red light.

I'm very curious to hear whether this is the way others print. Do you print black last and solve the drying issue some other way? Or do you simply disregard that little "halo" that one gets when a yellow trap lands on top of the black?

[gweedoh]

I always run black down first and every shop I've ever been in runs this way.

[ATG204]

any offset shop i've ever been to lays black down first, although "school" teaches you the opposite because black has the highest neutral ink density.In programs like InD you can change the trapping sequence in ink manager and that rearranges the way the inks are "layed down" from the file. by default black is always #4

[Vinny]

It depends on the Ink's Tack number. We used to run black last 20 years ago.

[jminrod]

I worked for a large web house using UV ink and UV dryers, and I am now working for a mid sized sheet fed house and both places refuse to run any color laydown other than black down first. It does cause prepress issues when they want to trap mettalics or large black areas need to trap.

[beermonster]

yeah we do mostly black first, but for us it usually is judged on a job by job basis - and if there's metallics they will put those down first everytime

5 colour jobs (5 colour komori's) depends on the design again, but still generally black first

Per my pressman. 2c= black last. 4c= black 1st. All depends on the job! :wink:

[Hansonian]

every shop i've worked at runs black first for 4c work.

[maxpower]

first

[prepress_vee]

We ran black last for the past..... I don't know 15 years.. because that's how our pressman liked it. Never - not once was it a problem. No reprints because something was wrong or didn't look good. Including metallics, etc...
Now it's black first, yellow last with our brand new Heidelberg PM74!