RE: colour management at digital/quick print shops
RE: colour management at digital/quick print shops
- Subject: RE: colour management at digital/quick print shops
- From: Scott Olswold <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 13:59:41 -0400
Larry,
Funny you should ask, as that's what I primarily support.
In most cases, the color management happens at the RIP (Fiery, Splash,
Cyclone, etc.), partly because the owners of the devices haven't been
properly trained by the sales force and, by default, these devices handle
color conversion and proofing chores as part of the RIP process. The other
side of the equation is that a lot of "chain" quickprinters have some
incredible turnaround (a wage issue, usually), so intellectual capital is
lost with every new hire. The combination of these two makes
workstation-level CMS rather difficult to manage.
I helped a quickprinter establish some color management policies and
procedures that utilized the Canon ColorPASS Z60/CLC 1150 as their
destination printer. Overall, it worked rather well except for CMYK images
of unknown origin (which sometimes ended up very pale in comparison with
their RGB brethren). Specifically, I aligned their workstations (both
Windows and Mac) to use the RGB working space EFIRGB (5000K; 2.2 gamma;
R=.63, .34; G=.31, .595; B=.155, .07) and profiled monitors. The
PostScript-stream applications (meaning, non-MS Office) had their CMYK space
set to the V55 profile (I used the canned one; it is very accurate based on
the copier), relative colorimetric all around.
The MS Office apps were a bit difficult because I couldn't color manage them
directly (they were using Win95B at the time), so I set up the ColorPASS so
that, by default, any incoming RGB job would be handled effectively. Even
the "origin unknown" cmyk printed out OK.
Scott Olswold
Senior Systems Support Engineer
Danka Office Imaging
MCSE, CNA 5, A+, Network+, Adobe Certified Expert (PageMaker and Photoshop)