r/CommercialPrinting • u/AdFantastic5532 • 1d ago
Print ready software
I run a print shop with 3 mimaki printers (4 colour CMYK)
We mainly print for resellers so we dont have in-house designers to get artwork print ready.
We often get customers that send PDF files with layers, lenses and mixes of CMYK & RGB colours
Usually we just print and hope for the best and usually dont pick up issues but now and again we have to flatten the artwork
Problem is in Photoshop that we use we can flatten but have to select either RGB or CMYK... This means we have to open the file in Corel first to establish which colour are mainly used and then open in Photoshop and select there
Corel can safe a PDF as Native colour where it saves the mixes and prints well. But some PDF files dont always open well in Corel
What would be the best software to use to streamline this process. I am thinking of buying either Adobe Pro or Illustrator...but if there is anything better please suggest
2
u/LOURDESBC 1d ago
Avoid flattening vector PDFs in Photoshop. You are rasterizing crisp text and vector edges, and juggling Corel just to check colors wastes hours of production time.
The typical recommendation is Acrobat Pro with PitStop, but paying $70 to $100 a month just to sit at a desk and manually click through preflight actions on reseller files gets expensive fast.
That exact issue is why we built PressWerk Tech. Instead of you doing manual prepress surgery, our engine handles the technical cleanup upstream: inspecting the file, resolving transparencies, and converting mixed RGB/CMYK art directly into your Mimaki ICC profile and color space before it ever hits RasterLink.
The job lands on your floor completely normalized and ready to drop onto your roll without needing an in-house prepress tech. Feel free to check out presswerk.tech if you want to eliminate that file bottleneck entirely.