Prepress Technicians and Workers
Tasks
Core Tasks Include:
- Enter, store, and retrieve information on computer-aided equipment.
- Enter, position, and alter text size, using computers, to make up and arrange pages so that printed materials can be produced.
- Maintain, adjust, and clean equipment, and perform minor repairs.
- Operate and maintain laser plate-making equipment that converts electronic data to plates without the use of film.
- Generate prepress proofs in digital or other format to approximate the appearance of the final printed piece.
- Proofread and perform quality control of text and images.
- Perform "preflight" check of required font, graphic, text and image files to ensure completeness prior to delivery to printer.
Supplemental Tasks Include:
- Examine photographic images for obvious imperfections prior to plate making.
- Operate presses to print proofs of plates, monitoring printing quality to ensure that it is adequate.
- Examine unexposed photographic plates to detect flaws or foreign particles prior to printing.
- Examine finished plates to detect flaws, verify conformity with master plates, and measure dot sizes and centers, using light boxes and microscopes.
- Perform close alignment or registration of double and single flats to sensitized plates prior to exposure to produce composite images.
- Inspect developed film for specified results and quality, using magnifying glasses and scopes, forwarding acceptable negatives or positives to other workers or to customers.
- Punch holes in light-sensitive plates and insert pins in holes to prepare plates for contact with positive or negative film.
- Mount negatives and plates in cameras, set exposure controls, and expose plates to light through negatives to transfer images onto plates.
- Operate and maintain a variety of cameras and equipment, such as process, line, halftone, and color separation cameras, enlargers, electronic scanners, and contact equipment.
- Perform tests to determine lengths of exposures, by exposing plates, scanning line copy, and comparing exposures to tone range scales.
- Mix solutions such as developing solutions and colored coating solutions.
- Activate scanners to produce positive or negative films for the black-and-white, cyan, yellow, and magenta separations from each original copy.
- Select proper types of plates according to press run lengths.
- Analyze originals to evaluate color density, gradation highlights, middle tones, and shadows, using densitometers and knowledge of light and color.
- Set scanners to specific color densities, sizes, screen rulings, and exposure adjustments, using scanner keyboards or computers.
- Perform minor deletions, additions, or corrections to completed plates, on or off printing presses, using tusche, printing ink, erasers, and needles.
- Arrange and mount typeset material and illustrations into paste-ups for printing reproduction, based on artists' or editors' layouts.
- Scale copy for reductions and enlargements, using proportion wheels.
The data sources for the information displayed here include: O*NET™. (Using onet28)
