Re: Rel vs Abs proofs
Re: Rel vs Abs proofs
- Subject: Re: Rel vs Abs proofs
- From: Marco Ugolini <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 23:27:51 -0700
In a message dated 10/12/06 7:27 PM, Rick Gordon wrote:
> Well, I work primarily in the book industry, where there is plenty of paper
> white to be seen, and find that the dots in white areas can be quite clearly
> visible.
How closely do your clients look at the proofs? There is not much, if any,
apparent graininess in inkjet proofs made at 1440dpi from a normal viewing
distance (10 to 15 inches), and you can always print at 2880dpi if that is
still not good enough in your judgment. Also, the smoothness is increased by
the presence of more than just one ink in the proof, plus the fact that some
of these inks are the light ones (light cyan, light magenta).
> Obviously, trimming helps, but it's still visible, and often the prospect of
> trimming upwards of 250 proof sheets is decidedly unappealing.
Well, who said it was going to be easy? ;-)
Look, it's not advisable, besides unprofessional in my opinion, to provide
to the client a proof printed with an Absolute Colorimetric intent without
making sure to trim away any edges that are not covered by ink. The eye's
chromatic adaptation mechanism will perceive the brighter whites at the
edges as the reference, and the observer will complain that the print looks
dull. Why invite trouble?
> According to my reckoning, the question is basically one of mitigating the
> variance between AbsCol and RelCol in the light values, while not winding up
> with an overly strong shift in luminance between the pure whites and the
> nearly white values.
All of this because it's impractical to trim the proofs...?
And the sensation of dullness will still be there even in a "hybrid proof",
because there will still be a somewhat perceptible discordance between the
lightest areas in the image (which will still contain some of the simulated
white of the output) and the visible brighter white of the proof's
substrate.
> I would say that, since a number of experienced prepress folks on this list
> have issues with some of the aspects of AbsCol rendering, that it is not an
> open-and-shut case that AbsCol is the only viable alternative.
Correct, it's not.
We can do an AbsCol proof, and make it more faithful to the intended output.
Just as it's intended to be -- oh, plus trim the proof...
Or we can use RelCol, and give ourselves and the press operators a headache
(besides causing very likely cost runups in makeready) because the goal is
unrealistic. Which sounds silly at face value, but I know that marketing
departments and designers like to oversell, and so everyone in production is
left stuck trying to match the pristine sparkling quality shown in a proof
that just looks too beautiful ever to come true.
Or we can attempt to achieve this ventilated goal of a "hybrid proof", but
the advantages are still not clear to me. We sort-of want to preserve some
of the advantages of an AbsCol proof, but also wish to accommodate the
client's preference for the higher punchiness of a RelCol proof -- sounds
good in theory, but I suspect that the final balance still registers as
negative (it creates more production problems than it seems to solve in the
marketing portion of the deal -- and let's not forget that the final product
*is* the proof of this pudding).
Regards.
--------------
Marco Ugolini
Mill Valley, CA
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