Well that's good to know. I had seriously got into FlightCheck WorkFlow, spent hours and days perfecting the ultimate image convertor and flightchecker for pre-troubleshooting. I was assured by my IT guy, this is the shit. Yeah, it is shit alright, I could never get it to do what I wanted, even when it did what I wanted. With the merging of the web in print-based layout apps, it has made keeping a handle on acceptable file-formats a bitch. Before I had eps, tifs, DCS eps, the occasional pict, or metafile, but now? gif, jpg, pcx, png the list goes on and on. Plus, now that transparencies have been established, in conjunction with these screwy file formats, my job is a lot more complicated. How could a workflow possibly catch a font with licensing issues, or a corrupt jpg? It can't. That is my job.

I don't trust automation, unfortunately. I know damn well a good workflow would be a timesaver, but I do not and will never trust a computer to catch all the problems with a designer's crafty little brochure. I have never seen anything that actually works to a point I trust it enough not to do it myself, which I do trust. Out of 100 jobs thrown out on press from me, I have had 1 come back for a trapping issue, (automated). If I had my way, every Prepress guy would hand dissect every job that came in. Automation and workflows are the downfall of us Prepress guys, so go ahead and support your replacement, but I guarantee that computer could never do as good a job as a good Prepress guy CONTROLLING IT. Prepress is about instinct, experience and knowledge. A computer can be programmed for all of those things except instinct. My instinct tells me, if a designer can build a file, a Prepress guy should fix it.

When I worked in CA at Trader Publishing, we had these custom made photo punches for diecutting all those neat little pictutes that go in the mag, of course this was way before digital. Anyhoo, we made catapults out of them, marked the floor for range with ruby tape and made projectiles out of unfolded paperclips and wax balls from our hot waxer. You will never laugh as hard as we did the day this hot chick from accounting walked by and then spent the next 2 hours digging that waxball out of her perm. Later we modified the waxballs with no. 14 exacto blades, I was cut approxiamately 12 times from 1 projectile! And, yes it hurt. No one else would volunteer.

A bindery friend of mine, yes I said friend, told me he knew a kid training on a 40" cutter. He lopped off both his forearms and bled to death before the ambulance could get there. He was talking on a cell phone and running a cutter, can you say... DUMBASS!

That is correct, but let me explain... If I have to decompress files due to their instability I have LOST my patience. If a database is attached to an image file that can be corrupt, and does, I have LOST my mind!

They may not technically be "lossy", but it depends on where the loss is felt. No one will argue that LZW compression is unstable. I myself have been bit too many times to ever recommend using it.

Yeah, I bought the same convertor. I am not as pleased about it as you seem to be. I would almost rather work in Publisher, shit, did I just say that?

Reading is not one of my strong points obviously.

Okay, so how many times have you been flipping through a file and notice images with 4 color black, (registration, Auto)?

A quick fix to remedy files with more than 300% total ink coverage is to copy the black channel and adjust with levels or curves to make the darkest part of the shadows plug, within tolerance and the highlights taken out. The easiest thing to do is invert the channel so it is a negative image, open levels, auto balance it, then adjust midtones to take away any pixels that will interfere. You will understand in a minute.

Make a new layer, load the channel. change the foreground color to be the correct combination on black you want. I usually go with 40-20-20-100.
Use the paint bucket tool and click in the selection. Now, the first thing to look for is too much black, in which case you need to readjust your "new" black channel and start again. If the file is changing color too much, again readjust your channel. The trick is to make it print correctly without changing the look.
 
You can also use this same technique when modifying 4 color images that need to be spot colors. Like changing the red to magenta and remapping to a spot, or making a spot in PS and saving as a DCS 2.0 multichannel eps.

Try it out.

I just made the same file and got a 544K document saved as a PSD file. I am not a fan of JPEGing or Tiffs w/LZW compression because of the whole lossy problem. I don't understand people who want exact color saving files like this knowing full well that their image is being resampled.

Also, is the file 8 bit or 16 bit? That will make an enormous difference in file size.

Unfortunately, the best way to get freelance is through your sales force. I hate having to ask them for anything, but I figure they owe me, so ask your least hated sales guy to hook you up, and after he sees that you are more than capable, he will send more your way.

Prepress guys are the best designers for one reason... they actually know what will look good and what will not through experience. I tell designers all day long... You make it look pretty, I will make it print. After so many years, you figure out fast that design is easy, printing is hard.