Workflow integrity
Workflow integrity
- Subject: Workflow integrity
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 10:44:15 +0100
What you are talking about is theory, and ideal workflow. Not real life.
I'd say you've got me pegged -:).
The integrity of the workflow depends not solely on your profiling
application, but on the choice of transport format (PDF 1.2, Scitex
CT ...), staggered application ICC support (some like it hot, some
like it not, some are just flirts -:)) and so forth.
Folks like Steve Upton and Franz Herbert are building profile
documentation tools. That's great, it's a big step in the right
direction.
But it's not enough to guarantee the integrity of the workflow. To do
that you must have a specialized workflow tool. If folks in Maine and
Mississipi (yikes, did I spell that right -:)) and Texas and Berlin
set up a workgroup to produce a printed piece, then you need
something I tend to think of as a workflow synchronizer.
It has to figure out if you have two versions of ColorSync installed
(thanks to the Quark installer -:)) and if your profiles for the
actual project are synchronized (drag the production profile into the
workflow chart on my workstation and a record is built that is
checked with the workflow chart on workstations listed in the
workgroup directory for the project), and it has to check if we all
have proofers with enough gamut volume, and our applications are
current (chuck Illustrator 8 that doesn't hand off color managed
files), and if our transport file format supports what we want to do,
and many other things.
My problem with this is that on the surface the ICC workflow looks
like smooth and shallow water but just underneath you have the CMM /
API / application / driver / RIP matrix which is the California tar
pits of ICC color management -:).
Overall I think one of the most important things is quite simply to
give as many users as at all possible a concept of how the technology
works - as a framework. This way folks learn how to make sense of
UIs, and that is the very first step towards troubleshooting
workflows on your own. (And they also learn to beware of consultants
such as the bloke who advised 60 designers in the Estee Lauder studio
to manage color in the LaserWriter driver -:).)
There is no cure except time for the pitfalls of legacy software that
strip out ICC profiles, embed the wrong profiles, trigger unwanted
conversions in the RIP or don't trigger wanted ones, and so forth
endlessly. (Except that Workflow Synchronizer which Franz and Steve
will now build for us all to play with -:).)
--
Henrik Holmegaard
TechWrite, Denmark