On 17 Sep 2012, at 08:23, Rob Griffith <robgriffith@colourcollective.co.uk> wrote:
I think you'll find that most resellers on this list also, like me, spend a lot of time building profiles on-site for customers and for a very wide range printers and RIPs. Also our exposure to a wider set of workflows make us ideally placed to provide feedback to X-Rite, which we all do on a regular basis.
I appreciate that Rob, but there is still a fundamental difference between the requirements of image makers and the requirements of colour management people. Our relationship with the results of using these products is a sensual one -- as I imagine is the relationship with those that create these products. Standing between us are a group of people for whom the products are a commodity. You come in one year to sell us solution X and then the following year you're selling solution Y. Sure Y has benefits over X, but they are more often than not benefits that are more useful for the middleman than the end-user.
From the image maker's POV we'd be much better off with better documentation on solution X and a point release that fixed the bugs in it that we'd been able to feed back ourselves -- if only we had the opportunity.
A clear example from this forum of how the current situation doesn't work for image makers is the recurring problem of Profilemaker v2 profiles producing a cyan scum dot in the non-printing areas of inkjet prints. Reported by end users years ago, isolated as a problem that was unique to Profilemaker and Photoshop CS5 on the Mac by end users. Yet denied, misinterpreted and ultimately ignored by X-Rite and the colour management 'experts' that stand between the end users and them. Like a lot of problems that disrupt our production and waste our time and money it'll be solved by us spending more money on newer products and then quickly erased from memory, giving the impression that the current setup of you standing between me and X-Rite (and Adobe, Apple etc) is working OK. And, for the record, I'd still like to know why the PDFs sent to the Mac print spooler by Photoshop CS5 using Profilemaker ICCv2 profiles are structured in a way that causes the cyan scum dot? Profiles made using any other software from the same chart data do not do this. PDFs generated by Photoshop CS6 don't have this problem either... -- Martin Orpen Idea Digital Imaging Ltd