Apple

I need some assistance from anyone familiar with color management and building and using ICC profiles.

I am very familiar with building custom printing profiles and have been using them for several years with great results. In addition to the many profiles we create for inkjet proofing and digital printing systems, the profiles about which I am writing are for commercial CMYK offset presses.

(Note: In commercial offset printing, we never know on which particular press we will print so we obviously can not profile every press. However, when printing in Asia for example, we use the same pre-press house for virtually all jobs. And since all the printers can easily match their press proofs, a common practice in this trade is to profile the press proofs, not the production press, which again, we know they can match. It's worked out fine for years).

Although our basic profiles, which we created for our commercial offset printers, have been working quite well, many of our images are matte laminated after printing (book covers, display boxes, etc…). As you can imagine, the carefully prepared printing profiles are useless in these instances, as the colors change noticeably following a matte lamination.

So we print out the “target” calibration charts, have them matte film laminated, and THEN we do our readings and create these matte profiles. So in theory and in practice, the images converted to the matte lam profile, and then printed and laminated, should end up looking nearly identical to the same image which is printed with the “straight” profile (non laminated profile). I’m assuming that the image that has been converted to the matte lam profile will actually print out extremely bright and saturated, to compensate for what will happen when it gets matte lamination. Or, to put it another way, Image A converted to CMYK using the original working profile, and NOT laminated, should match Image B, after lamination, as long as the new "lamination profile" is used. Right?

So, here is my problem. Since this is not documented anywhere that I can find, what is the logical workflow, at least in theory? Any particular advice as to which rendering intents to use in this instance? If I simply convert the image to my matte lam profile using Relative Colorimetric, the results don’t seem to do much in helping the image once its laminated. Although when I use Absolute Colorimetric rendering intent, the colors instantly become extremely vibrant and saturated, as I would expect they might, so it appears that I was on the right track, but again, not as accurate as I would expect. What is the correct workflow for getting predictable (better) results with images that will be matte laminated? Let’s assume that the matte profiles are accurate. I just need help in using them correctly in this instance.

There's really no way that I can see to "soft proof" the image as it will print prior to lamination, since the profile is created on the laminated targets.

Thanks very much,

Robert Rock