Special Report: The Three Ps - The Country House Pairs Traditional Products with New-age Production

Flip through a catalog from The Country House, and you’ll get a sense of the great care that goes into creating its pages. The Salisbury, MD-based company produces 10 issues a year; in 2001, that represented a print run of more than 7 million books.

The 7.5˝ x 10.5˝ catalog is chock full of colorful product images—everything from furnishings to collectibles. Any cataloger will tell you that high-quality photography that’s expertly rendered to ensure exact color and texture can translate into customer satisfaction and sales. This catalog is no exception.

“The Country House has taken great leaps into digital reproduction to make sure images invite sales and that customers see precisely what they will receive when their purchases arrive,” explains Marie Grossman, who manages catalog production.

The Country House works with freelance commercial photographer Gary Marine to digitally capture the catalog’s product images with a Light Phase digital back. Grossman says the cataloger has been employing digital photography for nearly two years, rounding out its full commitment to digital production workflow.

“Digital photography and in-house prepress have empowered us greatly,” Grossman says. “In bringing prepress in house, we’ve enjoyed big savings in time and money, and the digital photography has given us the advantage of having larger high-res files from the start. The accuracy and detail we’ve been able to capture are phenomenal.”

Digital photography also supports The Country House’s Web site, (www.thecountryhouse.com). High-res EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) images from the catalog are optimized for the Web site at 72 dpi (dots per inch). Before the printed catalog arrives in-home, information on new products has been added to the Web site, so customers immediately can order online if they want.

The site includes all new merchandise as well as any remaining stock from previous catalogs. “Since the catalogs seem to have an unusually long shelf life,” says Grossman, “it’s helpful that customers can access [products] so easily. The Web site address appears on every spread in the catalog.”

Grossman explains that she primarily uses QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop to lay out the catalog’s pages, and the powerful Adobe Acrobat InProduction to RIP the native application files to PDF. The PDFs are proofed, then preflighted, and sent to the printer, Brown Printing, Woodstock, IL.

Eventually, this process will change, Grossman adds, because Adobe discontinued the development and sale of InProduction in December 2001 due to its incompatibility with Acrobat 5.0. In the future, The Country House may use Acrobat as a standalone application to create PDF files, but turn to another developer for a preflighting solution.

Files are sent to Brown either on CD-ROM or via a password-protected FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site established by the printer. All proofing (both for composition and contract purposes) is done in-house.

“The right equipment helps,” Grossman suggests. Throughout the creative process, pages are proofed on LaCie monitors running with Macintosh G4s. For hard-copy proofs, the company uses an Epson Stylus Pro 5000 with a Fiery RIP, and it prints on DuPont/Epson Commercial Matte proofing paper.

Even with a standardized digital workflow in place, catalogers and their printers continually evaluate the workflow for inefficiencies and adjudicate the quality of the proofs based on the final printed products. “We calibrated carefully with Brown Printing when we began [to create our] digital workflow,” Grossman says. Regular calibration helps, but it’s the personal touch that ensures accurate color reproduction. After the catalog’s files and digital contract proofs arrive at the plant, Tony Pratt, prepress technical specialist at Brown, pulls a few test pages on its proofer to be sure the process and equipment haven’t drifted.

Once at the plant, the cataloger’s PDF 1.3 files are put through a rigorous verification process. First, they’re preflighted with Enfocus Software’s PitStop Server 1.6, which detects problems, such as fonts that aren’t embedded, unintentional spot colors, low-res images and non-CMYK color space, says Pratt. “The resulting report from the server is in the form of a PDF that can then be e-mailed to the creator,” Pratt continues.

If problems arise, the client may choose to resubmit a corrected file, or for a fee, the printer can make the last-minute corrections.

Once the files are deemed problem-free, they’re introduced to one of Brown’s Highwater RIPs that generate separated, screened TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) files. These are sent to a hot folder for further processing, this time by Apago’s Piktor software, which converts them to five-file DCS format, Pratt explains. After an OPI (Open Prepress Interface) swap of low-res images for their high-res counterparts, single-bit TIFF files are ready for Brown’s Creo 5067 Trendsetter for plating.

“The catalog is printed on a Heidelberg M2526 press and saddle-stitched, with ink-jet addressing on the cover and order-form insert,” explains Jan Shalayda, senior sales representative at Brown Printing.

The Partnering Process

For The Country House and Brown Printing, partnership is not just a concept, it’s a practice. Grossman says that Shalayda attends each press check on behalf of the cataloger. Before the project goes to press, Shalayda visits with Grossman to review the contract proofs and discuss expectations.

Shalayda notes, “To continue providing the high quality the client demands, we worked closely with our corporate IT group and assisted [The Country House] in the purchase decisions for their internal design group. When they bought the recommended proofer, our prepress department guided them in calibrating it to our presses for maximum accuracy of color.”

Pratt suggests there are three primary benefits to this workflow: “The customer can hold to tighter deadlines by avoiding the time spent in redoing files when errors are discovered at the printer. The customer [also] saves money by avoiding down press time, which would occur when errors are caught on press. And Brown benefits by problem-free files introduced into our workflow, saving us time and the goodwill of the customer.”

Says Grossman, “The technology just seems to keep getting better, assisting both creativity and productivity.”