Re: Profile Editing
Re: Profile Editing
- Subject: Re: Profile Editing
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 15:18:00 +0100
it was only a
couple years ago many users were still using Photoshop 4 to do their
seperations, and getting RelCol for all of them.
Edits are choices and choices are relative to a baseline. The
baseline is the process control and the ICC production profile.
Photoshop 4 rested on a proprietary CMS and applications couldn't
share Adobe Separation Tables.
Also, how many workflows set up ASTs for the master process for use
on workstations?
IOW there wasn't any color management and what you saw on the monitor
didn't connect to the press. The notion of choosing types of gamut
mapping - which is what intents basically are - doesn't really apply
unless you have an industry standard format for exchanging color
information, process control and device characterizations, and
software that works with device characterizations in the standard
format.
These days you plug a CPC unit in front of a Speedmaster, run a press
sheet, measure it, calculate the profile with the embedded version of
Printopen 4, and have calibrated color from the press backwards to
the monitor. Then comes job ticket meta-data and much more in the
coming years.
What is happening I think is that high quality will become
increasingly available, and production will be able to reach back to
the desktop to help ensure the integrity of the workflow by
automating application setup just as much as the desktop will be able
to reach forward into production with job tracking and other
information.
I recently shot a series of low gamut landscapes in the
fog; I didn't need to compress their alreaqy low gamut, so RelCol did fine
for them. A few days later I shot skiers in brilliant outfits in bright
mountain sunshine... no way those images would fit within any output gamut
without compression.
We're now at a point where it works on the scanner and it works on
the press, and is starting to work in the desktop applications, if
you watch your step.
What I'd like to see is fewer workarounds and more workflows. It's
easy to make color management hugely complicated and harder to keep
the integrity of the workflow in mind and still get high quality.
You're right that going to CMYK with perceptual will introduce some
gamut mapping in originals that may not need it, but then you don't
have to go to CMYK off the scanner unless you want to.
The beauty of CIELab and tagged RGB hand-off for late-binding
workflows is that people in the downstream workflow get to decide
where at any of an indefinite number of points they wish to reduce
the gamut for a specific process, and what intent they wish to do it
with in their ICC compatible software - saturation, relative,
absolute ... or perceptual -:).
ICC technologies are in principle fully open but the trick is to make
them workable.
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Henrik Holmegaard, TechWrite
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