Commercial Printers and Color Management
Commercial Printers and Color Management
- Subject: Commercial Printers and Color Management
- From: email@hidden (Lee Blevins)
- Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 19:35:49 -0400
- Organization: Digital Graphics, Inc.
I heard a story from a customer the other day that caught my attention.
I also had a similar experience and can see this coming to a lot of
people.
Here's the short story:
Designer gets her scans done a trade shop (mine) and gets proofs with
them. She outputs her proofs on her Epson printer and all is well. Our
proofs look very similar to hers and she's happy.
She takes the job to a commercial printer (high end, not schlock
printer) and gets Kodak Approvals.
The color is way off. Very heavy magenta cast.
Printer charges her an arm and a leg to color correct all of her files.
She comes to me and asks why. Note we did not make all the images on the
job, many are legacy images from a wide variety of sources she's used
over the years.
Here's my take on this.
The printer is using digital plating. They have adjusted their solid ink
densities and curve shapes for their plating in such a way that they are
unique. They don't match and "standard" proofs such as a Matchprint,
Fuji ColorArt, Dupont Waterproof, etc.
Given that they are so different from any proof anyone could get outside
of their shop this would seem to be a problem for them to print anything
that they didn't scan.
Now comes the problem.
I feel they should have color management that can map images from an
outside source to their color space. I know this isn't magic bulllet
but it certainly is better than no management at all.
Recently I had a similar problem with a printer. I was amazed at how
little the printer knew about color management. They were stuck in a
complete "CMYK I only know how to use Photoshop curves" reality. I tried
to explain to them that the adjustment needed was more than just
adjusting CMYK gradations and it took quite an effort to take them to
the water and get them to even look at it, nevermind drink.
At the end of the day we profiled their press and made proofs that so
closely matched their printing that even I was surprised.
What we did was batch process all of the images with a "Convert to
Profile" in Photoshop and reproof them with the new profile. At press
time the job was a tremendous success. Very easy press OKs.
Now my point is, isn't it time printers use RIPs that have built in
color management to handle images from outside their world?
I certainly don't think it's fair to charge someone an arm and a leg to
color correct all of the images because they didn't scan them.
I would be more than happy to take their press profile and proof with it
so the customer could see what they can expect and deal with this before
the 11th hour.
At the bare minimum they should provide the designer with a profile so
they can at least preview on the monitor what they're going to get.
Sorry about the rant.
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