Re: Who does the seperations?
Re: Who does the seperations?
- Subject: Re: Who does the seperations?
- From: "john castronovo" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 06:36:43 -0500
I usually follow your approach Marco, but just today we did a few drum
scans for an agency and they requested CMYK files. I probed a little bit
to discover that the end use was display prints for a trade show booth
and the display house was going to print them, and I knew that if I
supplied SWOP I'd be limiting the result. The original films were very
colorful and full of deep blues that stood the chance of going purple if
someone simply clicked on "Convert to CMYK" as I was instructed to do by
the AD.
"This is all we ever do", I was told. I suggested that they send my RGB
files with a written note to honor my embedded profiles because only the
person running the printer knew how to do this best. I'm hoping for a
good result which is 50/50 chance.
Who knew if the display house was using anything from a Lambda or
Lightjet with photo materials, a flat bed solvent printer or an Epson? I
couldn't even find out which country it was going to be printed in.
People who run Lambdas say that the usual submission is SWOP in spite of
the fact that they print RGB because designers are convinced that all
printing requires that one click to cmyk with prepress defaults.
john
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marco Ugolini"
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.
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