So here it is…
*Drumroll*
The long anticipated Correct Color blog.
Well, long anticipated by me, anyway.
So what’s going to set this blog apart from all the other color blogs out there?
Well, two things, I hope: First is I intend to write it as much in English as possible, and second is…well…
I write a column for Wide-Format Imaging Magazine now and again, and in each one I’ve written I’ve always felt at some point I’m pulling a punch here or there. Not to say I’ve said anything I felt was untrue, but maybe I’ve been a little careful with the shading or left out a name or two. After all, they’ve got to sell advertising to everyone in the industry, and they might stop wanting articles from me if I ragged all over one of their biggest advertisers. Not to mention that my opinions and observations are my own. I didn’t bring anything down from the mountaintop, and of course your mileage may vary.
But here, the opinions and the consequences are all and only my own.
But thing is while that’s all true, I’ve been around a lot. And there’s a bunch of stuff you see behind the scenes in this business when you’ve been around a lot.
And when I see them or as I think of them, I’m going to write about them here.
Like, for instance: There are any number of digital printing forums out there, and on these any number of forums there are any number of posters who’ve got this printer-profiling thing all figured out. They’ll tell you. Just ask them.
Problem is, for the most part, they don’t.
And you may very well not either. Even though you think you do.
Think you do?
Okay, once you made an ICC profile, what steps do you use to check it?
Set aside for now that actually making the profile is the easy part, and here’s a little tip for you: Of all the spectrophotometers out there –assuming of course they’re calibrated and working correctly– just about all of them will yield virtually indistinguishable-from-one-another profiles depending on the profile-making software you run their data through. But while all the various spectrophotometers out there will pretty accurately record the data you feed them, the differences in the profiles made by the different profile-making software packages are huge.
Huge.
There are over 15 basic ICC profile-making engines available out there, plus permutations, and none of them produce identical results. Some of them produce spectacular results. Some of them produce good results. Some of them produce adequate results. And some of them produce terrible results.
Want to know which does which?
Well, watch this space. But for another tip for now, the price of entry for good or spectacular is slightly over two grand. That’s for the software, not including a device. Packages that you can buy with device and software for under fifteen hundred bucks are going to give you results ranging from less-than-optimal to awful.
Okay, you may say, but I ain’t gonna mess with profiling my printer in any event. Why should I? I use Velvette-O-Smooth Premium Satin Matte, and Velvette-O-Smooth.com has profiles I can download for my printer for Premium Satin Matte, and everyone knows Velvette-O-Smooth is the industry leader, so surely their profiles are top-quality, right?
Well, maybe.
Or maybe not.
Ever checked one? How would you know?
Because, back to those things you see when you’re behind the scenes, you’d honestly be surprised. Some of the huge names in media have some surprisingly mediocre profiles available for download. And some have one or two profiles renamed for ten or twenty different media.
So, whether you made them yourself, or whether you downloaded them, how do you evaluate your profiles to see just how good they are?
Well, that’s the first thing I’m intending to write about here. Unless I write about something else first.
But whatever. It’ll be pretty lively, mostly in English, and mostly interesting.
Just watch this space.
Dealing with the issue of color print matching the clients expectation can tricky. My background is principally in the test and measurement world of printed circuit boards. dealing with engineering and designers where parameters are quantifiable in standard measures, the whole color thing in print is chaos. Dealing with critiques such as “that just does not look like my screen” at first surprised me. Where are the standards? I wrote about my approach to the color in my LargeFormatPrinting blog, associated with B3DigiGrafx.
I’ll add an RSS feed to your blog and see what there is to be seen.
Ed,
Well, color is tricky and overall in the industry I’d say there’s a good deal of chaos. But neither has to be the case. And without necessarily resorting to “standards.”
Or at least standards as they’re meant in other industries. In lithography, for instance, the Holy Grail of printing color is to print it all exactly the same. And boy, are there ever standards. Not that everyone follows them or understands them or even knows what they are. But they are there, and there are a whole host of folks who have as their ultimate goal a grey and featureless world of absolute consistency where every printer prints every image exactly the same, and–and here I always hear Howard Beale–they are all as interchangeable as piston rods.
That might sound like a perfect ideal, and if every device on every media and in every situation could reproduce every color the human eye could see, it might even be worthwhile. But they can’t and they never will. So inevitably if you want complete and absolute “standardization” across multiple printers and media, you have to pick as your “standard” your poorest result. (A pretty fair working definition of SWOP.)
I don’t want to go there and I don’t want to work there. That’s why I love the large and grand format arena. There’s still competition here. People are still trying to be better. I went to your website and what you’ve got there is a serious investment in some top-flight iron. And the people who designed that iron and the ink you run through it and the RIP (or RIPs) you use to translate the pixels you’re sending it into dots have expended copious amounts of money in order to separate themselves from their competitors. A separation that is impossible if everyone is exactly the same.
None of which is to say that you can’t get consistent, predictable and repeatable results, or that your customers can’t spec a PMS color and get a similar result across all your printers on all your media. You can. And so can they.
What I’d do if I were you is get someone like Correct Color–or to put it less subtly, Correct Color–out there to get the chaos under control once and for all.
So far I’m enjoying your blog and can’t wait to see your opinions on all of the different profile solutions out there. Do you have experience with G7 calibration and what are your thoughts on G7?
Well thanks for the compliment.
Funny you should ask about G7. I’ve been giving it a good deal of thought of late. And was actually considering writing a blog post about it. So you spurred me to do that.
Mike