They can't think anything through and they don't have any idea what you want and they sure don't know the first thing about color.

All they understand is numbers. And they only do exactly what they're told. If you give them the proper numbers, you'll get the result you expect; but if you give them the wrong numbers, or you don't even know what the right numbers are, you're going to have...issues.

Regardless of your industry or your output device, if you want the color in your prints to match your screen and to look the same on someone else's screen or you want to match a PMS color or you just want your neutrals to come out neutral...

What is critical to understand is that while you may be thinking of color, your computer and all its interacting monitors, applications and printer drivers or RIPs is only thinking of numbers.

And while the digital revolution has put color printing capability within reach of everyone, it's done it with some have-to-be-learned caveats if you truly want to get it right.

And what the caveats boil down to is that since computers only understand numbers, they can obviously then only represent color as numbers. And while the numbers are the same to each computer, they are unfortunately not the same to the devices (monitors and printers, generally) that actually take the numbers and interpret them back into color for you to see.

There's just no getting around this either. You can't "turn color management off" because even if there's a handy little switch in your application that says you can, you can't. Regardless of what it says, your application is still generating numbers to represent your colors, and the next application or monitor or printing device is going to have to know to what color space exactly those numbers relate. If it doesn't know--and it can't unless you tell it--you're going to have...issues.

So in essence, what color management actually is is numbers management.

A completely color managed workflow has every device in its chain characterized and every characterization accounted for in its proper place so that the computer doesn't have to think, and what you're telling it to do is exactly what you want it to do.

And it works.

No surprises.

Every single time.

And set up correctly, it works seamlessly and behind the scenes, so you can be about the business of whatever you use color for, and out of the business of chasing color.