A new case history shows increased consistency and time savings of seven or eight hours from the use of a cloud-based imaging toning application.

The Journal-News in Hillsboro, Illinois, is making use of ECO-3 unit ProImage’s OnColor solution across the 25 newspapers it produces weekly from ten different content sources.

By automating the correction of colour and black-and-white images within PDF pages before they are sent to the RIP for platemaking, OnColor has “significantly reduced manual prepress work while delivering more consistent image quality and improved press performance”.

Before the implementation, the production team spent an estimated seven to eight hours each week manually correcting images in incoming PDF pages using tools such as Pitstop Pro and Adobe Photoshop. Image quality varied depending on the source, with some publications supplying files that required little or no correction, and others requiring significant manual intervention.

Image toning has now become a straightforward, drag-and-drop process that requires minimal operator involvement, the “dramatic” time saving freeing staff to focus on other priorities.

“It's just drag and drop, no thinking,” publisher John Galer said, reporting the new process took “very little time”.

He said colour toning on images was very good and the same for black-and-white, with the images now “incredibly consistent”, and pages running well on press.

“Pressmen now shoot for a similar colour, as all the files really are consistent. We are not chasing colour all over the place on press startup.”

Pictured: John Galer with the company’s King press (photo: Journal-News)