Re: Remote Proofing
Re: Remote Proofing
- Subject: Re: Remote Proofing
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2004 08:52:55 +0100
Rich Apollo <email@hidden> wrote:
>Often the
>client is raising a ruckus because the proof off of my proofer doesn't
>match what they saw on their monitors or their printouts. I've even
>seen it stated on this list that the printer has the obligation to
>match the output of the creatives' $100 Epson/Canon/HP/Oki. I think
>that inverts the equation. I believe that the creatives ought to be
>trying to get output on their desktop printers that imitates what will
>happen on final output.
I don't think anyone would disagree, but the way ahead is not to stay
with proprietary proofing approaches.
Let me try to go over this in a bit more detail.
When Ken Applebaum was still Color & Imaging Product Marketing Manager,
he flew over to take a look at the Swedish graybalance printing project.
A group of people, Mattias Nymann, Martina Stahl and others, had come
up with an approach which was as simple as it was practical.
- Make the press operator _stay_ at the press throughout the press run.
- Give the press operator a simple way to check the graybalance using
fixed quantity process percentages in patches drawn in QuarkXPress and
inserted in the page.
- Issue default printing profiles, one for Swedish IFRA / NATS as such
and optionally one per printing process (we're not talking sheetfed, so
it is logistically simpler).
- Give the barely / newly ICC enabled desktop a way to get spot to
process conversions and RGB to CMYK conversions that really works.
- Back this with newsprint swatchbooks for the nationally approved spot
to process conversions so desktop has a visual reference.
This is in reality a low tech approach. Only a few people need to know
how to operate ProfileMaker and the SpectroScan, everyone on the
desktop works by the numbers with a simple visual reference. Everyone
in the press room can work by learning to judge the graybalance of the
fixed process percentages without even owning a densitometer.
And it didn't stop there, hats off to those guys. The hottest sheetfed
press for the Stockholm advertising crowd got a visit from Mattias who
spent four hours go over the press to optimize it, built ProfileMaker
2.3 profiles plus Photoshop 4 ASTs, posted them on the printer's
website, and had the printer publish a workflow color management guide
from creative through prepress to press. Just in case you think you
don't know him, let me point out that the man got the Benjam Franklin
award for excellence in popular science writing for his Photoshop in 4
Colors, published in 1994. As I've pointed out several times since 1998.
So here you have a fully enabled low tech remote proofing solution. You
don't need to cross-render in half-broken application software, you
don't even need a spectrophotometer and a monitor and printer profiling
application. You only need a swatchbook (made by people who do have
have a spectro and a print profiler) plus a window with daylight.
Ken did not believe this worked when he flew in, but he believed it
worked when he flew out. This was long before the U.S. even discovered
ICC color management (the Linocolor evangelist was still showing the
same slideshow he had been showing for years, I believe). Anyway, I ran
a feature in the IFRA/NATS all-Nordic magazine on this, as a roundtable
with Ken, Martina and Stefan Br|es, then of LOGO (and no, I did not
shut the Kielers out, they did not want to appear).
Ken's point was the same as yours, that the weakness in this effort was
that there was no way to eliminate the desktop 'proofs' which were not
proofs at all because they were forward renderings to the full gamut of
an inkjet. Bear in mind that ColorSync 2.5 did not support the
NWConcatCW construct and simply could not cross-render, nor could
Photoshop 5 and QuarkXPress 4. (The Illustrator team is not the
brightest on the block, so we'll leave those guys out for now.)
Ken's position still holds true, for a variety of reasons. But it is
increasingly being whittled down to a diminishing issue.
If you tell your clients to move to InDesign which lets them manage
text and color, and which supports embedding of the profile for the
printing condition, then you get a situation where the image design and
page design team, jointly with the client, uses a spectrophotometer to
validate that the studio proof matches the printing condition you have
published in the form of an ICC printer profile.
The challenge is to get a workflow guide on the web that describes how
to do this, without a lot of meddling marketing politics. It is _not_
rocket science and there are a good many on the developer and standards
side who are willing to help. The problem, as Richard Kenward pointed
out on another list, is that the ICC-enabled image design studio has no
color managed pipeline, because the page designer and the prepress
operator have been working in a low tech QuarkXPress, Type 1 and
proprietary proofing environment since before 1991. Anything the image
design studio does founders on the qualifications of the page designer
and the prepress operator. In other words it is necessary to start all
over with the page design people, all the way from the very basics, but
with the addition of the complexities that PostScript interpreters are
not all programmed correctly and are not all updated to support the
current rendering constructs.
The level of expertise on this List will scare the living daylights out
of even the people who write books about page design software. So it's
baby steps, tell the page designers that there is such a thing as text
management which is in many ways parallel to color management. Tell
them they are important because only if text management is done right
can color managed content be found at all. Call it a 'Typographic
Pride' approach, get these people on board by telling them that what
they do well is not irrelevant to the joint enterprise which is
publishing. These people have been screwed by Quark for more than a
decade, and believe me they will migrate if they can be given a safe
passage.
>And, Henrik, I'm sorry but you lost me on your last post. I enjoy
>reading your stuff, but you quickly go over my head. Any chance you can
>talk down to dumbguys like me?
Does the above help?
Thanks,
Henrik
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