Production Defining Digital (1,102 words)

Shaping the Terrain

In many cases, today's digital workflow still includes a number of analog steps. Those steps often are the image acquisition or photography, proofing and plating. Most present production workflows include a major digital component.

The typical digital workflow starts with scanning photographic images, then modifying and color correcting them using Adobe Photoshop (www.adobe.com). The corrected images are placed into pages created in QuarkXpress (www.quark.com) or Adobe InDesign (www.adobe.com), along with the text and any illustrations that were either scanned or created in a computer illustration program. This step replaces the manual stripping of a page. In many instances, this is where the workflow reverts to analog, with the individual pages output to film for proofing, and stripped to a press form for printing, final proofing and bluelines.