Refik Telhan wrote:
From the look of things your printer really seems to be stuck in the very old days. If they are in not capable of following any of the calibrate-than-profile road to any of these standards, simply ask them to supply an ICC profile that represents the printing that they can do on your paper. If they cannot do this by themselves, then just send them an ICC profile target, such as IT8.7/4 and/or ECI2002 as a page of your job and ask them to print it as they normally would print your job. You can then have these targets profiled by a ICC profile service provider.
That only works if they run the press in a consistent manner. In the "bad old days", the press operator would tweak the press for each thing they were printing to "make it look good" or (better) to try and match a proof print sent to them with the job.
Once you obtain the ICC profile, you can use it for all of your RGB-to-CMYK conversions and soft/hard proofing purposes. You can then just tell the printer to go on doing what they have been doing up to now and not change anything.
If they are used to manual tweaking, then they need to be given something independent of what's being printed to match, even if that's test strips on each page.
If they are not capable of doing any of the above, you should seriously start looking for a new print service provider that is capable of printing to a known standard.
Yep. Hard work bringing a old school printing business into the modern age.
From their perspective they are just trying to do their best to make whatever junk their customers send them meet their expectations, using the one tool they have.
Graeme Gill.