Re: Images for print
Re: Images for print
On 10 Oct 2008, at 16:16, Bob Marchant wrote:
Hi Eric
Getting to a stage were you can what I call "predict the tick" on
an image or proof means that you have to understand what makes the
whole production trail work. I think this is the role traditionally
that reprohouses filled,
Traditionally being the word . Unfortunately the repro houses had
( and to a certain extent still do have ) a view of photography
often at odds with the reality of a professional studio.
Well, they were/are charged with the responsibility of accurately
realising the signed off original in the target condition gamut,
difficult if significantly important areas of that picture are out of
that gamut...
) But we did have to have one foot in the conceptual camp, pink
glasses and yellow socks, and the other in the mucky world of ink
and paper, boiler suits and shrugged shoulders... if we were to get
any job successfully out the door.
Not essentially different from the world of many photographers .
Apart from the yellow socks of course :-) .
Well I was including photographers in the conceptual camp... but I see
what you mean, but the fact is that, again they were/are bound by the
constraints of the CMYK gamut - and their product connected directly
with the printing process, who practioners are definitely are the
Cinderellas when it comes to understanding the science behind colour
reproduction...
It does not surprise me that early initiatives for standard for
digital supply came from photographers, after all with the
potential demise of the transparency something had to be done to
make sense of the fidelity of their product. I can remember
"guide" prints from early digital files so saturated that you
needed RayBan's to view them! When the client got back a contract
proof, (and by the way, we would not call what was supplied then a
"contract proof" today, we have all learnt) and they were
introduced to the wonderful small CMYK gamut, well they could
hardly be blamed for throwing their toys out of the pram!
It's a lovely picture , but once again not quite the reality. It
wasn't a case of us throwing any toys.We had to produce the
guidelines in order to deal with the shortcomings of repro houses.
After all the years of using "CMYK" scanners ( yes I know , another
interesting concept ) , often using presets , the reprohouses had
no way of dealing with RGB digital files in any sensible manner. But
neither did they have any press targets for us to aim at because of
all of the internal closed loop systems and a determination to
resort to Digital Cromalin at any and every resort. When the
letters ICC became a little more common , we then went through a
period of being supplied with device linked profiles from their
scanning and proofing devices and being told to use them as
separation profiles . Oh ...and of course always being asked to
strip out profiles in both RGB and CMYK files. Didn't see any toys
being thrown at the time , but did witness quite a few hissy fits
in both camps <BG>.
Well not all reprohouses were quite like that (mine wasn't!) but I
recognise what you are saying. There were an awful lot of mediocre
repro suppliers, I accept, and scanners were complicated pieces of kit
that few could be trusted with, because almost nobody really
understood colour science. Many scanner operators were actually ex-
retouchers, which in truth meant ex colour etchers in lots of cases.
We entrusted, not unreasonably, the huge investment, (my first
scanner, a Hell DC350 cost £168K in 1985) to people that traditionally
were charged with colour correction, big mistake - huge. These people
generally had no idea about tonal relationships, they were selective
operators, they went for the small moves first. And with what we know
about colour numbers now, well they only worked with one colour space,
their own and assigned it to their own numbers. When the penny dropped
with me, when I realised that for years we had been doing it wrong, by
working in CMYK rather than RGB, I felt as disappointed as when I
first understood about dot gain and all it implied, and the fact that
that thrust came from outside the production sphere, from "dot gain
Dave Ewington of IPC. It was an indictment on us all in the industry.
And as for DP10, well digital cromalin was built on the serendipity
that Du Pont stumbled across with analogue cromalin, it was a great
deal better than flat bed wet proofs, but coloured powder on a post-it
note, come on.(no disrespect to 3M). For years we used as a bible a
flawed gamut.
We have a different workflow emerging today.
At last !
Well, it is still constrained by the same CMYK gamut
What continues to amaze me, is just how many of our colleagues in
the wider field don't even have the questions let alone the answers
and are still knocking out work every day...
Absolutely.
I have started every paragraph with "well". Well here's another one, I
started out as a camera operator in 1968, so I guess that makes me a
photographer too...
Bob Marchant
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