What is make-ready in printing?
Make-ready is everything that happens on press before the first saleable sheet: mounting the plates, setting the ink keys, getting the colours in register and running up to the approved colour. It takes the same time whether the run is five hundred or fifty thousand.
This is the single most useful concept for understanding print pricing, and almost nobody explains it to buyers. Make-ready is a fixed cost per job. It consumes press time, operator attention, ink and a quantity of waste sheets before anything sellable comes off the machine.
Spread that fixed cost over five hundred units and it dominates the price of every one. Spread it over fifty thousand and it disappears into the noise. That is the whole mechanism behind "offset gets cheaper the longer you run", and it is why the answer to "what does a box cost?" is always "how many?".
It is equally the reason digital printing exists commercially. A digital press has no plates and effectively no make-ready, so it starts producing immediately. Below a break-even quantity that advantage outweighs its higher cost per sheet; above it, offset wins and keeps winning.
Make-ready is also where colour is settled. The operator brings the sheet up to match the approved proof, checking density and register, and only then does the run proper begin — with colour bars monitored throughout to hold it there. A job that has an approved physical sample to match against makes this faster and more accurate than one that does not.
Related
Terms that go with this one
- Printing plate A printing plate is a thin aluminium sheet carrying the image for one colour of your job. It is wrapped… Read more about Printing plate
- Registration Registration is how accurately each printed colour aligns with the others. In register, the separations sit exactly on top of… Read more about Registration
- Offset lithography Offset lithography is the process behind most commercial printing. Ink goes from a plate to a rubber blanket and only… Read more about Offset lithography
- Digital printing Digital printing images each sheet directly from the file, with no plates and no make-ready. That means it starts producing… Read more about Digital printing
- Proof A proof is the version of a job produced for you to check and approve before production begins. What it… Read more about Proof
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