Explain something to me

[David]

so, can you get away with only doing the 2nd refine as a general rule?

[Joe]

so, can you get away with only doing the 2nd refine as a general rule?

Well technically you can't perform a 2nd refine without doing a 1st refine first. :tongue:

Like I said 99% of the time we only do a first refine which includes trapping, CM, Normalizing, preflight, etc...rarely do we use the 2nd refine.

[born2print]

I heard of some douchebag down the way that does THREE refines!
 

[Joe]

I heard of some douchebag down the way that does THREE refines!
 

Just for that I'm going to go and refine some 6 (SIX) times. No douchebag is going to beat me.

[Mikie]

I tried making an RBA that looped refines... shuts the client down. Pretty bored here today

[David]

so, can you get away with only doing the 2nd refine as a general rule?

Well technically you can't perform a 2nd refine without doing a 1st refine first. :tongue:

Like I said 99% of the time we only do a first refine which includes trapping, CM, Normalizing, preflight, etc...rarely do we use the 2nd refine.

I am using their naming convention, so there!    :tongue:

I thought you said that a lot of those options were not available in the"1st" refine?
but, for reals, you can do the "2nd" refine without doing a "1st refine" and prinergy is happy? I just did one and it did not complain.

[Joe]

Yeah I said technically...like you can't smoke the second cigarette of the day without smoking the first one. :tongue:

But yes you can run the PT named 2nd Refine on the original but the Color Mapping function will not be available. You can only do Color Mapping on a Normalized PDF and as far as I know the only reason to do a 2nd refine is to do color mapping during the refine phase.

[David]

so, to sum up...

if you live in a perfect world and you get pdf files that are correct (if you assume that it is what "they" want to print), you can do away with refining the file twice. If you need to "fix" colorants (as in mapping or converting), you will need a "2nd" refine to do that.


 

[Joe]

Not exactly. You can do conversions on a first refine but you can't do color mapping.

The only instance where I need a second refine is say a customer sends in a job that has 3 spot reds and one if them is PMS 032 and it also has 3 spot blues and one of them is Reflex Blue and the customer wants all 3 reds to be PMS 032 and all 3 blues to be Reflex Blue. At first refine all I can do is either keep all 6 spot colors or convert to process so I do my first refine and keep all 6 spot colors. Then I go back and run the 2nd refine with color mapping and convert the other 2 reds to PMS 032 and convert the other two blues to Reflex Blue. My 2nd refine will only have two spots, PMS 032 and Reflex Blue and when the customer views them in Insite to approve their job they will see only the correct number of colors instead of file with 6 spot colors or a file converted to CMYK...neither of which they want.

If you get files with spots and they need to process you convert to process on the first refine and be done with it.

IMO you only need to do a 2nd refine for Color Mapping.

[born2print]

We do it twice but we do it nice^©

[Joe]

Do you need the 2nd one for color mapping? If not what are you doing in the first and then the second? I've never heard of doing it that way but I wasn't around before version 5. What am I missing?

[born2print]

My theory is the 2 refine method used to be important, but no longer.
But we have embraced that from the start so all of our #1 refines are bare-bones and all of our #2 refines do all of the trapping, color converting, color management, GCR, etc...

[David]

our 1st refine does:
fonts and images
normalize
pdf preflight
spot color handling
color convert
optimize

the 2nd refine does:
fonts and images
normalize
spot color handling
color convert
trap
optimize

I was asked why we did two. I never knew exactly why you had to do it twice, it's just "that's the way we were lernt".

[Mikie]

our 1st refine does:
fonts and images
normalize
pdf preflight
spot color handling
color convert
optimize

the 2nd refine does:
fonts and images
normalize
spot color handling
color convert
trap
optimize

I was asked why we did two. I never knew exactly why you had to do it twice, it's just "that's the way we were lernt".

so first time it is doing everything but trapping, but preflights. second time it isn't preflighting but is trapping.  Not needed just use the process plan with trapping and turn on preflight. When you guys do the second refine, are you doing it to the input file, or the subpages from the first refine?

[born2print]

1st refine = Input
2nd = SubPages