By: Erik Vlietinck
Mon, October 29, 2007 - 1:48:00

http://www.proofmaster.net
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ProofMaster isn’t just a RIP for photographers who like to save money when printing to fine art papers or photo papers. It’s first and above all one of the most powerful proofing RIPs available in the market. ProofMaster is based on open standards, supports thermal, inkjet and virtual proofing devices, and can create FOGRA-certified and contract proofs. Proofing today happens primarily to confirm the colour accuracy of a file --PDF, image, or other-- and often also the imposition characteristics. 

Proofs are used to save money. By proofing a file on an inexpensive inkjet printer, the printer can ensure that once he starts the print job on the printing press, the file will look like it was intended in the first place. If he were not to proof first, he could end up with a print job that is inaccurate and needs correcting first. Without proofing, the printing press would have to be stopped to correct for the errors first. This would cost in terms of lost time, and especially lost resources such as ink, power and wear and tear to the printing press itself.

Virtual proofing, also called softproofing as in Photoshop’s View menu, is rapidly gaining recognition as a quick and dirty way of visually assessing whether colours are accurate. Unfortunately, the human eye accommodates to most any lighting condition, making it sheer impossible to get colour accuracy that is good enough for proofing an image or a PDF that is destined to be printed on a printing press.

Printing Technologies ProofMaster Supports

Obviously, ProofMaster doesn’t come into play when softproofing. Thermal proofing devices or inkjet printers are the technologies that ProofMaster supports as both use the paper and the inks the RIP can work with to carefully mimmic the actual printing press and media type used for the printing job itself.

Thermal technology is very accurate, but it’s also very expensive. Examples are CREO platesetters. These are slow working devices. ProofMaster supports them because they are still the most accurate when it comes to screening. Inkjet technology is cheap, inkjet printers have a large colour gamut, and prints are colour stable for long periods of time. They are supported by ProofMaster for obvious reasons: most printers have a Large Format inkjet ready for proofing at least the colours of an output job.

There are two types of proofing ProofMaster supports: Contone and Halftone. Contone is currently the most often used type. It is the real colour proof with little else information than colour accuracy being reported on. No raster information is checked with a contone proof. Contone proofs can happen at any time in the production and design process.

The halftone proof ProofMaster also supports is an exact representation of what is sent to the platesetter. It is a one-bit file which is handled by ProofMaster in such a way that screen angle and screen shape of the file are saved when proofing on Epson Large Format inkjet printers.

Standardised Solution

Standardisation is the magic word in the prepress, printing, and publishing world at large. ProofMaster is fully standardised itself. It can work in a Gradual SWITCH 07 workflow while proofing PDF/X files to the letter. All the information inside a PDF/X file is used by the RIP, except when the user doesn’t want the rendering intent to be honoured. In ProofMaster’s current version 3.x, the user will explicitly have to turn on rendering intent to be honoured, as most designers forget to set rendering intent as it should be when you want to comply with PDF/X standards.

Colour proofing in ProofMaster follows the ICC rules, i.e. PerfectProof uses ICC profiles throughout the proofing process and in the colour engine. Furthermore, ProofMaster v.3.x is standardised according to ISO 12647. With ProofMaster, you can therefore create Certified Proofs, but also --and this goes one step further-- contract proofs according to the FOGRA standards.

ISO 12647 currently has 7 parts. Part 7 covers off-press proofing working from digital data. One of the conditions to create a certified or contract proof according to this ISO standard, is the RIP using the same substrate during proofing as during printing. Where this is impossible, the proofing system should use a substrate that closely matches the gloss and colour characteristics as the definite substrate within very strict tolerances.

ProofMaster complies with this condition by literally simulating the substrate. For media with a texture, the user must create a “grey file” --how to do this is explained in the manual, of course-- which is a sort of photographic representation of the substrate’s surface. The RIP will take into account the differences in shades and characteristics when it proofs a file that will have to be output to this substrate. The RIP will even accommodate for variations in the surface effects for dark and light areas.

Finally, ProofMaster is the only RIP that has “n-channel” capabilities, meaning it controls each and every channel of a n-colour inkjet individually. A HP DesignJet Z-3100, for example, has 12 colours of which 11 are actually real colours (the 12th is a gloss enhancer). ProofMaster enables control over each of these channels separately, and manages them individually as well.

The only thing ProofMaster v.3.x doesn’t support as yet, are version 4 ICC colour profiles. Partly because they don’t matter much for proofing, although PerfectProof has already announced a future version of ProofMaster will incorporate support for these new colour profiles.