APR's Prepress Training Programs:

Flexographic printing is a complex process that involves many variables that can drastically affect print quality - such as plates, inks, aniloxes, machinery, separations, substrates, and people. There are also many variables that affect the reproduction of a color original, to include lighting conditions, physical characteristics of the ink, and the observer. So it is important that we, as designers and production artists, understand how humans see color and some of the variables and characteristics of flexographic process color printing.

There are many stages in the prepress workflow where the designer and/or production artist can take the initiative to optimize a job for Flexographic printing if they understand the basics concepts of the design process and color management as it relates to Flexography. These programs focus on the basic concepts of the Flexographic printing process, the design process and color management and how each component must be optimized to work together. Understanding these variables will help us to create quality separations for print and communicate more efficiently and effectively with the customer, designer, production artist, and press room in an effort to create a design that is both printable and aesthetically pleasing.

These workshops are designed for anyone that wants to gain knowledge required to design and implement prepress for the flexographic printing process or just improve the ability of jobs to run faster, cleaner and more profitably on a Flexo press. Topics to be covered include:

• Why Flexo needs special attention from a design perspective
• The importance of color - color theory for process color printing
• Adobe Photoshop features including scanning and editing an image
• Adobe Illustrator features including importing scanned images, vignettes, and typography

In addition to learning Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator applications, we will also discuss importing and exporting flexographic flies, digital proofing devices and output of film for flexographic plates. The hands-on portion of these workshops will be ideal for guiding the participant through the prepress process.

Prepress for Flexography 2-Day Training Program
October 11 & 12, 2005
Basic Photoshop and Illustrator 2-Day Workshop
Call for dates.
Basic Photoshop 1-Day Workshop
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Basic Illustrator 1-Day Workshop
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Advanced Photoshop 2-Day Workshop
October 13 & 14, 2005
Advanced Illustrator 2-Day Workshop
Call for dates.

(Click on any of the titles above for more detail.)