Who makes the separations?
Who makes the separations?
- Subject: Who makes the separations?
- From: Brian Lawler <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2007 18:04:53 -0800
Greetings, all,
I was flattered to see myself quoted in the forum yesterday, so woke
up from a long sleep to comment.
A bit of biographical update: In 1999, I was invited to be a teacher
at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in the Graphic Communication Dept.
Since then I have reduced my consulting and lecturing, and shifted
toward being a full-time college teacher. I recently accepted a full-
time tenure-track position position at Cal Poly.
At Cal Poly, we educate the printers and prepress professionals of
the future. Most of our students go into management positions, and
they take a lot of real-world experience with them.
We concentrate much of our effort on teaching color, prepress, and
hands-on work on sheet-fed offset, web-fed offset, flexographic and
digital presses. We have state-of-the-art equipment including
excellent computer labs, beautiful printing presses and all of the
prepress gizmos used in the industry. It's a great place to get an
education.
Teaching prepress is a challenge, as you certainly know. It's
difficult to simulate the tight deadlines and production requirements
found in the industry, but we do our best. In teaching color, I take
the students through the process of measuring and profiling our
presses, and I demonstrate how this knowledge will help them in their
careers. They get considerable experience in the evaluation of color
photos, retouching images, the application of color profiles, work
flows and more.
Each quarter I take on a different process. This last quarter my
students successfully profiled our newspaper press, which is used by
students to print our full-color daily college paper. It was as real
an experience as a teacher could hope to have. We ran the target in
the newspaper, read the resulting values, built a variety of profiles
and evaluated them. We applied the best new profile to photos and
tested images in the paper to see if we had improved the process. We
were very successful.
To the point of who does the separations, I am of the belief that
it's critically important for the photographer/designer community to
keep color in its original color space as long as possible, and not
convert to CMYK until the platemaking end of the process. There are
too many potential pitfalls and changes that affect the process
downstream. It's impossible to convert to CMYK without an intimate
knowledge of the process, paper, ink combination used to print the job.
It's also important for printers to see the value of quality control
at every step of the process. Putting color management into a quality-
controlled environment is not as difficult as trying to do it
piecemeal. I teach my students to go out into the industry wise to
the importance of the application of quality management, and of the
implementation of color management as a part of that effort.
Much ink (if you'll excuse the expression) has been spent this past
week describing what printers should do and what they actually do.
The irony of pushing the color conversion process upstream into the
hands of untrained and unqualified people is sadly ironic, but it's
the reality of our industry.
Obviously Photoshop can make excellent color separations for CMYK,
but it is ironic that many printers (and upstream practitioners) buy
Photoshop, install it, then use the default settings to make their
CMYK conversions. The default (SWOP) is largely inappropriate for
most printers, but that's where they land.
What I work to teach my students is to make CMYK that is appropriate
to the process. SWOP is not right for sheet-fed, not right for flexo
(not even close!) and not right for newsprint. I show them how to
make profiles that apply UCR or GCR, according to the process, and
more importantly WHY.
I stress, among other things, that every image (regardless of its
color space) requires an embedded profile, and that enlightened
prepress professionals know how to apply the right profile for each
process, press and paper.
I trust that some of this knowledge will be passed on to the prepress
practitioners who are influenced by our students when they enter the
industry. If I am successful, the students who graduate from our
program will take this hands-on experience and turn it into
operational processes that are responsible, and far above average.
They will at least know the importance of quality, and how to
integrate a philosophy of quality control at every step of the process.
One of the best experiences my students had this last quarter was to
see that our students routinely print better color on newsprint than
is allowed (word choice intentional) by the SNAP profile. Our custom
press profile revealed, and the students saw this first-hand, that
our color is measurably and visibly better than "default." This was a
great experience for them, and I hope it translates into a passion to
maximize quality wherever these students find themselves out in the
industry.
I thank all of you for your passion in contributing to the ColorSync
list, and applaud all the hard work that is being done to improve the
quality of work produced by each of you and those you influence. Keep
up the good work, my friends.
Best wishes for a colorful New Year!
Brian P. Lawler
Assistant Professor
Graphic Communication Dept.
Cal Poly University
San Luis Obispo, California
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