Pre-Flight has become a more important task as the Printing industry has advanced. In the past the final application of a product would have been in the majority a printed piece. With an influx of alternative ways of publishing a project the final requirement is not always for a printed product only. Modern DTP (Desktop Publishing Software) is capable of creating files for a variety of media, a single job now may end up as a printed piece, published on the web, published to mobile devices and in partial form used as a presentation or large format campaign.

Pre-flight allows us to check that the items within the file or files are able to be produced to the best quality for the desired media.

Pre-Flight is ideally carried out by those submitting the file for print. The problem is that Pre-Flight is not an exact science. What may be OK for some customers would be an issue for others,  a basic example of this is the resolution of an image. The case may occur that an image is of unsuitable resolution to be produced at optimum quality but this does not mean that the image cannot be produced at the lower resolution. The decision should quite clearly be made by the originator as to proceeding with the job.  The second most common issue is that of images supplied in an RGB colour space. In the whole print is a CMYK process and RGB images require converting from RGB to CMYK somewhere along the line.  Although these files can and often are converted within the Prepress process the conversion used is not always optimum.

Quit clearly the responsibility for supplying a file with the correct parameters is best left with the originator if they require a consistent and predictable result.