Re: Designers and color management
Re: Designers and color management
- Subject: Re: Designers and color management
- From: Dennis Dunbar <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:40:07 -0700
Interesting discussion going on here, thought I'd chip in my own
thoughts. I've worked in various ad agencies as a high end retoucher,
a production manager and as a color geek, (frequently all these at
the same time), and I've been through many different scenarios with
these agencies with respect to color management.
For the most part what I have seen is that they care about getting it
right, but are usually under too much time pressure to take the time
to change their workflow in all the various ways they need to get
things really under control. For instance one shop I worked at in
January, a smallish one with about 20 total employees, frequently had
client presentations that entailed printing out 20 or so 20" tall
prints of comps that needed to be mounted on fomecore, labeled, and
delivered for presentation to the client within a few hours. The
production staff for this usually was at most 2.
Their workflow was to place RGB eps files in Quark 6.5 and then print
directly to an HP5500. This was something they did so often they had
"curves" they would use in photoshop that got the color reasonably
close with one or two prints. After working with them as a retoucher/
color guy for a couple of weeks I profiled the HP and showed them how
to get accurate prints from Photoshop easily. But when push came to
shove they went back to placing RGB eps files in Quark 6.5 for the
presentations because that was what they knew and felt too much time
pressure to figure out a new way.
I think a great deal of what happens is that as reasonably
intelligent, skilled workers they had developed some sort of method
that while far from ideal had served them in the past. Their ideal
solution would be to change as little of their practice as possible,
largely because they felt they were somewhat close already. Changing
everything seemed like going too far backwards to them.
And being a small shop the idea of spending a few thousand on a RIP
and another few thousand having a consultant set it up for them
seemed like a major allocation of precious cash resources. To get
them to change was going to take time and patience, the kind of time
that comes from working with them for quite a while as you build up
their trust. And not the kind of time you have as a consultant coming
in for a day or two who tells them they've been doing it all wrong
for years. These guys are hard working folks who really care about
getting it right, but they've got years of working in a certain way.
A stranger coming in and telling them that way is wrong is gonna have
a hard time gaining their trust. And that is a big part of why it can
be a tough sell to shops like this.
The other type of client that can be tough to make money with is the
really small design shop with between one to four people. They can
see the benefit, but don't have the budget for the expensive RIPs, or
the high end profiling software (not that they're gonna remember how
to use it). My experience with shops like this is that they really
want help figuring out how to get Quark or In Design to print in some
sort of color managed way. This is not a big challenge and usually
only takes 3 or 4 hours to do. But how much money can you make off 4
hour consulting gigs?
Has anyone had great success with smaller agencies or design shops
like these? If so, how?
Dennis Dunbar
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