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: Joel <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 15:26:18 -0500
From: Greg Nuckolls <>
(clip) Only about 5% of our customers had what I'd call an
acceptable working knowledge and practice working with color
management... a pretty dismal figure, IMO. Hence, much of my job has
become educational and evangelistic... going out to our customers'
sites, and talking up color management. We'd rather teach the others
and bring them up with us rather than give up and sink back down. I,
too, am interested in hearing other experiences at this level...
please share! Larry, if you'd like to talk more off-list, please
feel free to e-mail.
Two of three post-secondary institutions here have toured their
graphic arts students through our pre-press department. Upon arrival
in the fine art monster huge department (me and a staff of Macs and
PCs) a fuzzy glaze goes over the instructors eyes and a familiar
'wazzat? look' fills the bright young faces of tomorrows graphic
desktop legions. I'd lecture and do QnA all day if I had more than
the five minutes allocated to describe what it is I do, but the
instructors - talented, proven graphic artists in their own right -
tend to describe color management as a curious alchemy not born of
the graphic arts but a realm of computer geeks and theoretical
quackery. Thus, every work experience student arriving here expects
automatic (and automated) color and instead gets an addition to their
education. In turn, every instructor touring their classes ends up as
one of my clients. Were it the other way round I'd be both a happier
and wealthier geekus lukus doofus and I wouldn't have to keep
handouts of ColorManagementABC Urls on my desktop.
But then...we're no experts either!
Most of our own graphic artists still calibrate their monitors
manually (even though I can demonstrate the accuracy of both
ColorVision and ViewOpen hardware calibration on any monitor in the
shop!) and several still use Thomas Knoll's Gamma control panel
running over top of AdobeGamma and/or Apple's Default Calibrator...or
worse, over top of the Optical I installed to demo. (No need for site
licences here because I'm the only one in the shop using it!)
I could go on and on...but I have to do some more figurative editing
from source Lab to destination Lab so I can come up with another
question someone with an answer might understand...
--
joel johnstone - designtype
Winnipeg Manitoba Canada
(Mouse to control. Mouse to control.Come in control.)