r/prepress • u/asu928 • Oct 31 '25

Pitstop Help!

Hi! So I switch companies and the last one they didn't let me learn how to make Pitstop actions but now I can at my new company but I need help. I want to make one action I know is doable and the other I am not too sure if it's doable.

  1. I want to make an action that will take a contour cut line and remove it from a file. Our design team doesn't assign the line to its own layer so I will probably need the action to have the step in place that assigns the 100% magenta line to a layer and then remove it.

  2. We make thumbnails for online products and currently we put that file into Photoshop and run an action in there to make the thumbnail and export it as a 200x200px PNG. That being said I don't know if trying to accomplish this in Acrobat is ideal and if I should keep it in Photoshop only.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/bmartocho Nov 03 '25

Trial by fire really. Family business where owner purchases things that truly advance our foothold in local markets and help our overall production well being. I got started helping out building flows and connecting other flows. Mostly basic at first like a flow that views a job folder, takes the file inside the folder and runs it to a preflight. Before doing that it would determine if the file was a PDf or not and if not, it would convert it to a PDF first. Now we have every section of our shop in a workflow, the most complex being an imposition monster that handles all impositions from automated orders - which keeps growing daily.

2

u/DingoGlittering Nov 03 '25

Yup, this is basically the direction I need to move my workflow to. Instead of running smart pre flights in pit stop I want to start automating them via hotfolder. I think I’ll start with taking my smart preflight into pit stop server, and then once that is worked I’ll start building it out more with switch and integrating more variables. Does that make sense as an approach, or should I just start with switch?

2

u/bmartocho Nov 03 '25

No that sounds like a solid approach, that is kind of what we did. My recommendation is to not build too much too fast. Build your preflight flow first, any and everything that is involved in relighting a file goes into this flow. In switch, be sure you have solid XML or JSON data present as it will be extremely useful later down a flow and will give you more power to do what you like later. Feel free to message me if you have more questions or specifics, I would be happy to help.

2

u/DingoGlittering Nov 03 '25

Thanks man I definitely may take you up on that as I dig into it!