The market for photobooks has exploded in the last few years, and customer demand is high for perfectly finished, great value products.
But the finishing process can be far from straightforward, with orders coming in for a range of sizes, and differing page quantities. One way to see the problem is to imagine photobook pages printed 4-up on SRA3 sheets. One of the problems is how best to arrange the customers’ pages onto those sheets. Pre-press has to arrange the pages in the correct order, so that when the sheets are guillotined into four, four stacks are produced, one for each customer. Not easy when each customer will have different numbers of pages.
The workflow is hindered because the pre-press presents major difficulties:
- difficulty in getting the customers’ pages into the correct order for the guillotine cutting, made worse because each customer’s order may have different numbers of pages;
- difficulty in batching together photobooks of different sizes so that the guillotines have reasonable stack sizes to be efficient.
The guillotines may present difficulties because:
- each guillotine needs a skilled operator, adding labour cost to the work;
- after guillotining, the stacks of pages have to be sorted into individual books ready for binding;
- pre-press may add in blank pages to balance the page numbers up, so these blank pages have to be removed;
- sometimes more than one guillotine is needed for each printer because of all the interruptions to efficient work flow.
To discuss your print finishing requirements please contact Andy Longston on +44 (0) 1226 745476 or [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +44 (0)1226 745476
3a Wentworth Way,
Barnsley,
S75 3DH,
United Kingdom
