Perfecting Proofing

Practically speaking, it doesn't make sense for Hammer—or any packaging printer with multiple jobs moving among multiple presses, for that matter—to create color separations for each process it plans to use, Pope explains. "It's cumbersome, time-consuming and ultimately counterproductive, and it results in expensive on-press tweaking," he says. "Rather, there is a huge benefit in bringing each press to a common printing condition, by which I mean a commercially acceptable visual match (within certain tolerances), regardless of ink set, substrate, or printing device, such that all that remains is to predetermine plate curves to help achieve that condition."