Adjusted equipment does not produce a result on its own. People operate it, and predictability of printing ends exactly where understanding of why each procedure exists ends. Training is therefore not an add-on to colorimetric adjusting, but a required part of it.
Directions
- Assessing staff qualifications. Testing to a defined method: what the specialists actually know, as opposed to what the job description says. This is the sensible place to start — the training programme is built on the results.
- Raising qualifications. Deepening knowledge within one’s own specialism.
- Changing specialism. Moving a specialist to an adjacent stage of the production chain.
Formats
- One-day courses. A single question taken all the way through: viewing conditions, file preparation, working with profiles. Suitable when the problem is known and localised.
- Intensive process courses. The full sequence — from the nature of color sensation to control of the press sheet. Duration by agreement, programme fully agreed in advance.
- Color science course. ICC output profiles and DeviceLink, 14–16 hours, remote.
- Programmes for a specific plant. Separate tracks for designers and for prepress specialists, taking the installed equipment into account.
Who is worth training
Training is usually ordered for the prepress department — which is right, but not sufficient. The second most important group is the sales managers. They are the ones talking to the customer before the order is signed, and they are the ones who need to be able to say, in time: this color on this substrate we will not reproduce. Said before printing, it costs incomparably less than said afterwards.
The press operator needs something different — an understanding of what happens to a file before it reaches the press, and why adjusting ink feed does not solve a problem that prepress should have solved.
Most often the difficulty is the human factor
There is a piece of trade folklore about one business card, built on the pattern of “The House That Jack Built”:
This is the glamorous business card
that Nikita the designer designed.
And this is the prepress man, going insane,
restoring the font that has vanished again
from the glamorous business card
that Nikita the designer designed.
And this is the manager, snug in his bed,
who slept through make-ready and left it unsaid,
on the glamorous business card
that Nikita the designer designed.
And this is the pressman, Van Gogh in his soul,
who poured in magenta to make the thing whole,
in the glamorous business card
that Nikita the designer designed.
And this is the cutter, Rustam-bül-Ogly,
who cuts a right angle exceedingly rarely,
and trimmed down the glamorous business card
that Nikita the designer designed.
And this is the owner, an ace in his field,
presenting the client his order, well sealed:
the glamorous business card
that Nikita the designer designed.
And this is the client, who hasn’t a clue
how — seeing his order was posters, A2 —
he ended up holding a business card
that Nikita the designer designed.
Funny exactly as long as it is not your print run. In a chain of six people every one of them did their part — and the result still came out wrong. Training is about making sure that, along that chain, the knowledge of what the result is supposed to be does not get lost.
To discuss a programme, see Contacts.