Re: Patience with CMS
Re: Patience with CMS
- Subject: Re: Patience with CMS
- From: Roger Breton <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 10:27:56 -0500
Ed, you raised a number of interesting points.
> Solved my problems months ago by unplugging the Epson 1280 and plugging
> in an HP 7960 (I know, water based inks, need to dry, need lamination
> or spray).
> Emailing jpg's to my local photofinisher with a Frontier printer was
> the smartest move in years, or at least for now..
Moving from Epson to HP was beneficial to you, no doubt. I can't talk about
the 7960 because I never used one. But its output is very impressive
nevertheless.
Sending JPGs to your local photofinisher could be fraught with problems, you
know. You don't say whether your JPEGs are tagged or not and whether your
photofinisher has profiled its Frontier (I imagine he/she did it) and
whether he/she converts your JPEGs to their Frontier profile for output. I
know a large number of photofinishers who simply don't bother, out of
ignorance or policy: whathever number you give them is the number they dump
onto their Frontiers. Some will even color-correct it. One has to be very
specific when dealing with these Frontier guys.
> Color management to me is like a pile of broken window panes, stand
> real still while its working or you'll cut yourself.
In one word, you can say that with color management there isn't much
"lattitude" -- hey, here's one term that made it into the digital world!
(I'm pulling your leg)
> You clients
> don't care. Its only digital, right? I mean my third grader has a
> scanner.
Yes, there is something inherently simplistic (or reductionnistic) about
owning all these modern digital color gizmos. They are designed to create
"good" color out of the box but to go beyond "good" onto "correct" or
"matching originals" requires a quantum leap of knowledge about a host of
things digital.
> Let's just say the color management world lacks a certain
> self-centering stability.
Interesting idea. The idea of color management itself does not, IMO, lack
stability but its very implementation *does/may*, under certain
circumstances, lack the stability you describe. Any printer manufacturer (HP
for one) could come up with a true ICC color-managed, self-stabilized
printer tomorrow. The tools are there, the engineering is there. But would
we be ready to pay the kind of money these would end up costing to produce?
Just take a look at a Xerox laser printer. At $6500, one only gets the basic
image forming mechanism, no self-control wiring, no color correcting or
stabiling electronics. I think if Xerox was to adorn all that extras onto a
Phaser 7750 the price could easily run into $15,000. Would I be ready to pay
for all that extras? Probably not. Samething for an inkjet printer although
high-end inket printers like the HP5000 already have all kinds of advanced
stabilizing controls but the kind of cybernetic controls you mention which
would most likely jack up this puppy's price by another $10,000 to $15,000:
who would want to pay for such a RollsRoyce? Maybe with time and the
evolution of technology, we could have what you describe in a matter of ony
fives years but we're not there yet.
> Suddenly appearing and disappearing kitchen
> drawers
> in an indifferent planet's kitchen.
I know the feeling when the wive has moved the coffee pot ;-)
> The most profoundly absent thing about digital is the equivalent of an
> f/stop, a timer, and
> a decent color analyzer.
Digital equivalent of f/stop can be calculated. There are some authors that
have spent the time calculating "digital" zone system to work with in
Photoshop. Timers, I have not seen. Everything happens instaneously, or
almost, with digital that timers have no digital imaging equivalent that I
know of. Digital versions of color analyzers are called a spectrophotometer.
(OK, they're not truly digital but they plug into a digital imagin system no
less). But I have to agree, they don't come with friendly color correction
filters readout. On the other hand, I think Photoshop's latest CS version
embodies some equivalents of color correction filters (light balancing 80a,
81a, ...filters), so it's a step in the right direction. Hopefully, as more
and more photographers come to embrace the digital world, Adobe will create
more and more color correction options that look and feel like traditional
photographic paraphenalia.
> Here is my projection: HP is about to gobble up the color output
> business. Epson is going to get its teeth kicked in.
If you look at it from a historical perspective viewpoint, more printing
innovation has come from Epson than HP, IMO. My projection: Canon is about
to wake up but I, personnally, think we'll still have Epson, HP and Canon
for a long time. And that's good because, in principle, they should all
outdo each other, technologically, for our benefits.
> HP printers in my experience have better color management right out of
> the box;
Could you elaborate on that idea a bit? Any examples?
> I would think RIP industry people see the writing on the
> wall.
I'm not familiar enough with english to interpret that expression. Do you
mean that RIP vendors are endangered species?
> I am no mood to pay more for a RIP CD as I did for a printer thank you!
That's because you don't work in the printing industry. To a printer, a
PostScript RIP is as much an important business system as a sheetfed press
as a typewriter or word processor a business is to an office manageer.
Printers make money with RIPs. So they look at it as an asset, an
investment. Besides, they are used to pay indecent amount of money for
color gear presumably because of adversary economies of scale...
> As for the press industry, I have no idea what you deal with,
It's being complicated by printers with no good will or patience, or living
in the stone age that CMYK is god.
> but going
> by this forum, you are tremendously patient people with enormous
> ability to put up with this stuff.
It's because we live under time constraints -- we need to get our jobs
printed -- and not all printers are willing to collaborate. And when they
do, it can produce wonders like Bill Atkinson's Inside the Stone book, or it
can produce disasters. So, it's an incremental process. As long as we keep
our targets in mind, each iteration in the print loop should get us closer
and closer. It's a lot of work.
> Like yourself, I have run out of patience with the industry. Do it on
> screen with the numbers, jpg it to the Frontier guy.
Whathever works for you is best for you. As long as you found a receipe for
success, you're more than welcome to share it here.
> Ed Gerson
Regards,
Roger Breton | Laval, Canada | email@hidden
http://pages.infinit.net/graxx
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