If some ethereal hand holding a huge magnifying glass was to descend on your business in an effort to search out its heart where would it focus?

Most litho printers are almost certain to say the presses and would back up such a choice with justifications full of passion and fervour, but they will be wrong; the beating heart of a well run litho house is plate making. ME Printer some time back published an article about a printer in Kabul who exposed his plates using sunlight. It did the job for him and this suggests it doesn’t quite matter so much how the plates are produced – whether from film processed on an image setter or created directly via a CTP system, plate making as the printer in Kabul recognised, is the pivot on which a printing business spins.

Plate making is the heart of a litho business and just as a heart takes in oxygen-rich blood from the lungs and redistributes it first to the brain the best printing heart is a Computer to Plate or Computer to Film system (CTP and CtF). An incoming job is a printer’s oxygenated blood, without a constant supply of new orders, the printing house will die; it also follows that a weak and under performing CTP system is like a heart with poorly functioning valves and muscle tissue, the business will atrophy. Undoubtedly the spur for new business growth will come from concentrating on the effective control of the data leading up to plate making, mining it to make sure it works harder and harder for you and of course much more efficiently.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important workflow is to plate making and how it is the ideal point at which to take stock of your business. There is gradually coming to market a wonderful set of workflow tools that ensures plate making doesn’t occur in isolation, enabling interaction to take place with almost every aspect of the production of print even to the point of sending the customer an invoice for finished work. This development will be discussed shortly, but back to basics for a moment. Here a simple example will do. What is the point of being able to make superb plates holding a two percent highlight or shadow dot if the press cannot reliably hold or produce such an image?

Two conundrums immediately appear; which requires solving first depends to a certain extent on a point of view; naturally enough one concerns the plate making system; regardless of what method is used any system in place must be able to respond to what can actually be produced on the press and the second conundrum concentrates on the press.

For quality print it is vital to first benchmark the press; understand its fingerprint, where dot gain occurs and why, what blankets offer the best image reproduction and what fluctuations occur in the ink and water balance. Strive to eliminate any sources of inconsistency. Keep a daily logbook of how much alcohol is being used, (do this quite separately from the minders, you would be surprised how much the daily use can fluctuate); check Ph levels of the fount at specific times of the day and the room temperature when data is being logged. It is only once a knowable consistency of press performance has been established is there any point in turning to the plate making system and the workflow that drives it.

The benefits flowing from a surety of consistent press performance borders on the dramatic. Dot gain has a certainty about it in the same way as taxes and death, but in part due to the inks it often most notable in the midtone ranges of cyan and magenta but this can be