Under the terms of the deal, London-based F1 Colour will provide local account management for UK publishers, while the actual retouching, cut-outs and other prepress work will be outsourced to Indian-based Express KCS.

F1 managing director Ken Harrison said: "The only way that publishers can cut prepress costs at present is to take on risk, responsibility or more of the repro tasks themselves via inplant or workflows. We believe our new offering delivers the upside of savings without the downside of taking on any more roles."

The company is already sending ad hoc cut-out work to KCS, but is waiting for the right selection of pages to come along to run the live test for what will be an exclusive deal between the two businesses.

Harrison said: "A section will be run here in London at F1 Colour and also been done in India. Then we will compare file integrity, proofing, we may even get it printed as the client wants to test it right through to the nth degree.

"Obviously we want it to be a good test, so we want it to have retouching, cut-outs and colour conversion on it. We're going through the process of identifying the pages that we think are a perfect test – not too easy and not ridiculously difficult either."

F1 hopes to have the service up and running within the next few months, provided all goes well, although final costing won't be figured out until KCS have completed the test sections.

Earlier this year Newsquest cut 27 jobs as it outsourced its prepress work to Express KCS's Indian operation.