Re: Profile Editing Thoughts . . .
Re: Profile Editing Thoughts . . .
- Subject: Re: Profile Editing Thoughts . . .
- From: email@hidden (Lee Blevins)
- Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 12:13:12 -0400
- Organization: Digital Graphics, Inc.
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My world of color is currently focused on supplying 'digital proof'
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solutions to customers who wish to either limit, replace or substitute the
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need to create film, to then build an 'analog proof' for financial or
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workflow reasons. The output must 'visually' match the final printed item,
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within 'expectable' variance.
Mine is very similar to yours.
My company is a prepress company who wants to show customers a proof of
the press form before going to press.
Our goal is to be able to match a Matchprint.
We are doing that with good results now but it was not easy at first.
It seems the secret to our success lately has been in how we calibrate
the printer BEFORE we profile it.
We make every effort to make the printer match a Matchprint before we
start the profiling process. We adjust the solid ink densities to be
slightly higher than the Matchprint but in the same proportions.
I have tested two rips, Postershop and Wasatch. Both had very confusing
approaches to achieving this simple calibration.
The terms they used were foreign to anyone who's been in the printing
business for 30 years such as myself. Even worse, their dialogs were
sloppy and inconsistent and their documentation was unreadable. The
documentation was not even consistent through the manual and a total
lack of clear "step by step" procedures.
All I could really get from the manuals was "here's a list of our menus
and dialogs you go figure the rest out."
The lesson I learned from this experience is "trust my years of
experience and not rely on newbies to the trade and color scientists
who've never sold a print job" to provide procedures.
Printing is printing. What you print with or on doesn't really change
the physics of laying colorants onto substrates in register and to a
specific geometry. The same old rules still apply.
Rules like, if you change the hue of the colorant too much God and all
the color science in the world will not allow you to match what's done
in another process with a different colorant.
For example, if you use Rhodamine red in one process and Rubine in
another, you aren't going to make them match. Forget it. True you can
pull the color management trick of using a few selected images that seem
to match to support an argument but as soon as you have to make a color
the relies on the pure version of magenta, it's not going to happen.
As far as tweaking profiles after creation I can see why it's necessary
in some cases. Like why Kodak makes their black go all the way to
highlight by default. Did their color scientist actually observe a
process where they wanted 2% black in light yellow colors? Or did
somebody spice the color science water cooler?
My advice to you and anyone trying to do what you're doing is rely a
little less on wierd science and a little more on practical experience
and simple logic.
Before profiling, see if you can print a reasonable image without
profiles in CMYK. If the image comes out too whacked, fix the printer
settings before wasting time reading all those targets.
Just my two cents.