Re: Commercial Printers and Color Management
Re: Commercial Printers and Color Management
- Subject: Re: Commercial Printers and Color Management
- From: "Mike McManus" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2003 02:17:51 +0200 (MEST)
My thoughts. Having worked with this problem in a digital workflow for
years. You're right. Printers should
be profiling their equipment. And customers have to be informing their
printers of the profiles they are
using.
Printers who don't use color management are in the dark ages. And that does
not require they use
profiling in RIP either. It can and in some cases, should be done elsewhere.
We used Autoflow, since we
had multiple rips with differing capabilities..
At the same time, we had customers who didn't use any profiling or if they
did, didn;t know what they
where doing. Which of course left us in the dark.
So its a process. Which should be a lot further along than I have found it
to be. Can I say, blame the
people who are selling work for us? Just a porr production vs sales slam.
Sorry.
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I heard a story from a customer the other day that caught my attention.
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I also had a similar experience and can see this coming to a lot of
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people.
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Here's the short story:
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Designer gets her scans done a trade shop (mine) and gets proofs with
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them. She outputs her proofs on her Epson printer and all is well. Our
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proofs look very similar to hers and she's happy.
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She takes the job to a commercial printer (high end, not schlock
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printer) and gets Kodak Approvals.
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The color is way off. Very heavy magenta cast.
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Printer charges her an arm and a leg to color correct all of her files.
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She comes to me and asks why. Note we did not make all the images on the
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job, many are legacy images from a wide variety of sources she's used
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over the years.
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Here's my take on this.
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The printer is using digital plating. They have adjusted their solid ink
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densities and curve shapes for their plating in such a way that they are
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unique. They don't match and "standard" proofs such as a Matchprint,
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Fuji ColorArt, Dupont Waterproof, etc.
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Given that they are so different from any proof anyone could get outside
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of their shop this would seem to be a problem for them to print anything
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that they didn't scan.
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Now comes the problem.
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I feel they should have color management that can map images from an
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outside source to their color space. I know this isn't magic bulllet
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but it certainly is better than no management at all.
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Recently I had a similar problem with a printer. I was amazed at how
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little the printer knew about color management. They were stuck in a
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complete "CMYK I only know how to use Photoshop curves" reality. I tried
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to explain to them that the adjustment needed was more than just
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adjusting CMYK gradations and it took quite an effort to take them to
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the water and get them to even look at it, nevermind drink.
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At the end of the day we profiled their press and made proofs that so
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closely matched their printing that even I was surprised.
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What we did was batch process all of the images with a "Convert to
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Profile" in Photoshop and reproof them with the new profile. At press
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time the job was a tremendous success. Very easy press OKs.
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Now my point is, isn't it time printers use RIPs that have built in
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color management to handle images from outside their world?
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I certainly don't think it's fair to charge someone an arm and a leg to
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color correct all of the images because they didn't scan them.
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I would be more than happy to take their press profile and proof with it
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so the customer could see what they can expect and deal with this before
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the 11th hour.
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At the bare minimum they should provide the designer with a profile so
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they can at least preview on the monitor what they're going to get.
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Sorry about the rant.
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