Re: Unity profiles revisited
Re: Unity profiles revisited
- Subject: Re: Unity profiles revisited
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 09:24:59 +0200
Matthew Ahearn <email@hidden> wrote:
A client of mine has just found out the hard way that sending a job with a
generic CMYK profile in all TIFF files produced an absolute disaster for
him.
As a consequence the client concerned has paid (him
self) for the replacement film etc.
It still looks the same however has the new profile embedded
when saved (In this case it was the Generic CMYK profile).
It is the scanner operator's mistake not to color correct and
separate to either a known industry standard or a custom printing
house standard, and then embed that profile into the scan. A four
channel CMYK file is not a complete billable product, unless the
separation profile is correctly embedded into the finescan. Photoshop
6 will simply open that CMYK finescan in its source profile space,
and save it out in that space again. The Adobe user experience is
good.
But if the user who opens the CMYK finescan is making the assumption
that she should make Photoshop bow to the Apple ColorSync Workflow
Settings, and if the user has not changed those Workflow Settings
because she assumes that Apple knows better than she does what to do,
then she may end up retagging the CMYK data.
The CMYK and RGB unity profiles are automatically created by
ColorSync itself in the top level of the ColorSync Profiles folder.
If an Apple user selects 'ColorSync Workflow' in Adobe applications,
then both the user and the Adobe applications are making reasonable
assumptions. The Adobe applications use the ICC profiles they are
told to use, and the user is choosing the profiles she rightly
assumes she is meant to use.
However, the assumptions made my ColorSync are not right IMO. The
unity profiles are default 'assumed source spaces', but you don't
want to use them as such in the real world until Apple brings
ColorSync in line with industry standards -:).
Actually, as ColorSync itself creates the CMYK unity profile, and as
ColorSync is localized along with the rest of the Mac OS, it would be
a piece of cake to make ColorSync generate different unity profiles
for different world regions, ISO 12647 positive for Europe and ISO
12647 negative for the US, for instance.
At least it's worth a thought, instead of the usual 'defaults are for
the hapless non-professionals' assumption that drives software from
line layout to color space conversion -:).
--
Henrik Holmegaard
TechWrite, Denmark