Insite 8 and custom ICC Profiles for MatchPrint Virtual

[johnny_jay]

Hello,
We upgraded this week to Prinergy and Insite 8. No major problems but one hiccup was from something I missed and I wanted to share.

If using MatchPrint Virtual with Insite and/or PressProof and you have created custom color profiles for your printing conditions you need to open each one in Color Target Manager and hit "Update". If not, your colors will not match.

John

[Joe]

Good info. We don't use MatchPrint Virtual though but...

Not to derail your thread but does everything in Preview look blurry to you comparing it to the old Flash version. On a normal screen you can definitely see a difference but on a retina screen it is horrendous. Smart Review isn't as bad but it isn't as sharp as it was in the old Flash version.

Another thing I don't like with the new Preflight Plus in Prinergy/Insite is that if you want the preflight info to show up in Smart Review you have to run the preflight on the normalized file. If you run the preflight on the original file no preflight info will show up in Smart Review. Which sucks because we want our customers to see the preflight of their original files. As it is now to see any preflight info we have to preflight the normalized files and then they do not see any warnings for RGB images because Prinergy has already converted everything to CMYK before it runs the preflight. Also the low res images that Prinergy creates during the trap process will then be flagged as a lot of low res images that are not in the customers original files and then you have customers calling asking what all of these low res image warnings are that aren't in the file they uploaded. Kodak's brilliant solution to this is to change the image resolution in the trap settings to higher than what preflight is checking for. Complete bullshit. They should fire the dumb-ass(es) that decided this was the proper way to go.

Kodak support basically told me tough shit on both of those issues. I'm the only one complaining so it isn't important. Until a I rang a few bells upstairs. They have contacted me a couple of times about the blurriness issue since my complaining upstairs and say they are working on it and then I received an email that my requests on the preflight issue will be fixed in the next major release. Now they might just be blowing smoke but someone got some people to at least lie better to me if that is the case.

And you installed Prinergy 8? What version did you move up from? The last I heard they did quite of few fixes in Prinergy 7.5 that they did not fix in Prinergy 8. Which is stupid if that is the case but Kodak being Kodak. That is why I have held off on upgrading to Prinergy 8.

[johnny_jay]

No problem for the derail.

We went from 7.0 to 8.0 for all 3 Prinergy, Insite, and Preps.

We did not install that Insite Patch because I saw your question on the Kodak Forum   

Preview does not look all that bad, no complaints yet but we are only 3 days in

We have not tried Preflight plus yet. I remember at GUA they said the preflight plus would work how you want it to so that stinks.

On a plus note, I do like Preps 8, in Preps 7 the text marks were never shown in the proper place until you made a vps.

I did open a case about the fonts on output and I don't think they are handling that well. He said he can't tell me what to do but people are either leaving it to error or making the change that you showed until they "get bit"

John

[Joe]

Yeah Preview wasn't 'bad' on our old non-retina iMacs but it still wasn't as good as the old Flash version was. Our customers noticed too. And then we got the retina iMacs. It does look good once you change the resolution that makes it look like you are viewing Earth from outer space.

I was PM'd by someone at Kodak after posting about their patch and later that day they pulled it from their website. Should be back next week. They said it was for other issues than mine though...yeah sure it was.

Yeah their stock answer on the font thing is it is Adobe that caused it and is out of their hands.

[johnny_jay]

The preflight plus thing has me bummed. I was hoping this would be so much better and we could pass on better info.

Not looking forward to testing it now.

Oddly enough, I always felt the old Java Smart Review looked better but was just in a dead or dying medium.

I am looking forward to not using Harmony as well for curves, that they added this function to ColorFlow, I least what I read, still need to dive in. I made sure Harmony didn't disappear.

I see good things in the future of Prinergy and Insite but the road is just too bumpy for not being beta.

John

[David]

ColorFlow is one bloated database monster. At least ours was, sometimes it would crash for no reason. Kodak would tell us our database was too big...

 

[Joe]

The preflight plus thing has me bummed. I was hoping this would be so much better and we could pass on better info.

Not looking forward to testing it now.

Oddly enough, I always felt the old Java Smart Review looked better but was just in a dead or dying medium.

I am looking forward to not using Harmony as well for curves, that they added this function to ColorFlow, I least what I read, still need to dive in. I made sure Harmony didn't disappear.

I see good things in the future of Prinergy and Insite but the road is just too bumpy for not being beta.

John

This is the actual word for word Quote from our Kodak support person over the preflight issue:

"Just to be fair, the whole point of Smart Review is to provide information about the file in the refined state that will eventually be going to the plate."

I called bullshit on that in no uncertain terms. I asked to at least give me the choice if which one I want to display in Smart Review. They have said it will be in the next major upgrade. What really steams me about it was during the beta testing stage of Insite 8 I reported this exact same issue and they agreed with me. FYI you can run the Preflight Plus on both the original file and the normalized file and then copy the XML file from the Original file XML folder into the Normalized XML folder and rename it to the exact name of the Normalized XML file and the preflight info in Smart Review will now show the preflight info for the original file. So I know it can work there. Kodak was just tool stupid and arrogant to put a swtich in the process template to let us decide what we want the customer to see.

Yes Kodak hasn't completely figured out how to do good HTML coding yet for display issues. And now they have to figure out how to code for the retina display too. Maybe in 5 years we'll see some progress.

I tried to figure out ColorFlow a few years ago when they first added it to Prinergy. It was a mess then and like David said it crashed every time you blinked. Haven't been back to it since that time.

Agreed. The beta testing is now done by all users. Full production now means "we are beta testing. Join in the fun".

[johnny_jay]

We do a first and second refine because we gcr all files. Our first converts rgb to cmyk so it can be gcr'd as well. This adds another layer to the fun.

At GUA we were told that with Preflight plus we would be able to flag images below a certain  dpi as a error and then have a dpi warning range. I thought that was awesome. It was from preflighting it twice. Looks like that is out the window.

Now I am not looking forward to testing it.

To keep positive, I do like Preps 8 though!

John

[Joe]

We do a first and second refine because we gcr all files. Our first converts rgb to cmyk so it can be gcr'd as well. This adds another layer to the fun.

At GUA we were told that with Preflight plus we would be able to flag images below a certain  dpi as a error and then have a dpi warning range. I thought that was awesome. It was from preflighting it twice. Looks like that is out the window.

Now I am not looking forward to testing it.

To keep positive, I do like Preps 8 though!

John

You can still do that I think by preflighting the normalized file. The dpi isn't going to change from the original to the normalized file. But you will need to change your trap image resolution setting to be above what you are preflighting for to keep from getting a lot of false low res warnings.

Don't get me wrong, Preflight Plus (callas pdfToolbox) is awesome but Kodak's implementation sucks. Oh you can also just use preflight profiles from Acrobats preflight if you don't want to go the Callas route. I can see no difference in either other than the extension name of the profiles but either one will work in Prinergy. What you lose going through Prinergy is any of the conditional preflight options since there is no way for a user to interact with different conditions during the preflight process but some of the fixes and checks are really cool. Until Kodak mucked up it.

[David]

We do a first and second refine because we gcr all files. Our first converts rgb to cmyk so it can be gcr'd as well. This adds another layer to the fun.

John

this can all done at one time with Colorflow, on the fly. We tried the GCR and UCR for ink savings, etc. It tended to work well for some things, others it turned it to a washed out pile o sh*t.

YMMV

[johnny_jay]

We looked at doing GCR with color flow as well but I believe we would need to upgrade to Pro. Ironically, we paid Kodak for our GCR profiles a few years back.

John

[Joe]

We have not tried Preflight plus yet. I remember at GUA they said the preflight plus would work how you want it to so that stinks.

John

Hey if you get a few minutes put in a support request that you want to use Preflight Plus and have the customers see the preflight for the original file instead of the normalized file. The more people asking for that the better chance of seeing it actually being implemented.

[johnny_jay]

Hey if you get a few minutes put in a support request that you want to use Preflight Plus and have the customers see the preflight for the original file instead of the normalized file. The more people asking for that the better chance of seeing it actually being implemented.

I sure will, once I dive into it and see for myself and have examples to show, I will open a case.

One thing about having a support contract, I am not shy about opening cases.

John

[Joe]

Same here. When you're paying how much we pay for support you better believe I'm going to use it at every opportunity.

[Joe]

Just to note...you will not see any preflight info in Smart Review if you only preview the original file. You have to preflight the normalized file and turn on the XML option to see preflight info in Smart Review.