Re: Legacy Proofing
The first thing to ask is "How relevant are these Matchprints today?". Depending on their age and how they were stored, it's highly unlikely that they are accurate for color anymore. Conventional Matchprint (as well as today's digital proofs, by the way) were never meant as archival products. They are intended for use as contract proofs in the here-and-now, and tend to be useless for color after about 6 months. Matching them is a fool's errand, in my opinion. If your intention is to produce a portfolio that is meant to impress a client, you're much better off making inkjets on archival stock with Ultrachrome inks. As a starting point, you could experiment with assigning various Matchprint profiles, or even some other CMYK profiles, until you find one that looks good on a calibrated monitor, and then feed that into your inkjet RIP. Forget trying to match the old analog proofs, and aim for a subjectively "nice" print. Good luck!
Chris Protopapas ************ email@hiddenFuel Digital Inc. 902 Broadway, 11th Floor New York, NY 10010 P 212-564-4646 F 212-564-2131 www.fueldigitalinc.com
Subject: Legacy Proofing
I run a high-end retouching studio in NY, highly color-managed, running Fuji FinalProofs as contract proofs which get sent to pubs and printers (along with data) for both ad and editorial work.
We are in the process of retooling our portfolio. This portfolio is made up of images gleaned from many phases of our history, some of which were created before we were ever profiling our files, editing our data in RGB, or even using the FinalProof. (Meaning, they were retouched as untagged CMYK and proofed as traditional, hand registered MatchPrints.)
Our goal is to take the existing files which created those MatchPrints, and convert them so that we can proof them using our present setup for the FinalProof, AND have them match exactly to those MatchPrints. Not only are we dealing with the differing data and machinery, but we are also using a brighter, cooler proofing stock than we did previously.
We have a few ideas about how to go about doing all of this (other than converting and color correcting each file individually), but were hoping that the list might have some suggestions as well.
Thanks.
GBDash Nucleus Imaging, NYC
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