Re: Who does the seperations?
Re: Who does the seperations?
- Subject: Re: Who does the seperations?
- From: Marco Ugolini <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:25:52 -0800
In a message dated 1/2/07 1:54 PM, Lee Blevins wrote:
>> There's still a lot of mystique surrounding CMYK separations.
>
> As a color separator of more than 30 years experience I'd have to say
> there probably is a lot of mystique. Some of it is just luck.
I want to state with all due clarity and respect that in no way my comment
was meant to disparage the work of experienced and competent separators like
Mr. Blevins.
It's just that in the real world, in the real situations that one encounters
when, for example, separating a press-bound job that will end up on some
packaging that will be printed by Who-Knows-Who in the country of
Who-Knows-Where with a press made by the Go-Figure Corporation, printed with
Mystery Inks on Inscrutable Paper, one realizes that the best one can do is
educated guesswork.
It's my sense, from many years working in this country, that when one says
"CMYK" here, more often than not the implication is "SWOP", meaning the set
of expectations that the acronym represents (a standard? a specification? a
piece of advice? it's still not completely clear, but clear enough for a
start). "SWOP" seems to be the expectation, whether the job actually ends on
a web press or on sheetfed, and once the image is in that ballpark, people
downstream seem to know what to do with it, most of the time.
Once that is understood, the guesswork gets narrowed to just a few
decisions, mostly involving black generation, TAC, dot gain, one-color
blacks, pure inks and a few other factors. And most of these can be
considered properly addressed indirectly through a carefully color-managed
workflow, possibly including device link profiles, and certainly a round of
proofs from either a RIP-based inkjet or some other non-film-based system,
knowing that we are providing an achievable visual target.
Once we view the task that way, it suddenly loses a lot of the "sorcery"
aspect, and becomes another one of the informed decisions to be made in the
course of a day. That's where the "mystique" sort of falls away, in my view.
Marco Ugolini
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