A couple weeks ago I got a call from my friends at eSigns.com just outside Detroit. They’re not only friends but a customer, and I’d been up there a year or so ago to do workflow management for them and to profile their Mimaki JV-33’s.

Seems they’ve invested in a brand new Gandi 1224 UV Flatbed–which is a great printing machine, btw. They’re running it with Onyx and while it was printing pretty much okay, they’d come across one job that was giving them fits. The color in question was a corporate color, a magenta-pink, and running the Gandi-provided profiles, they were getting a sort of lavender-salmon color.

That’s the way it can tend to go, too. You may have similar situations yourself. You’ve got a profile you got from somewhere and most of the time it prints okay or even well, but sometimes there are colors you have to chase for half a day to get, or sometimes you just can’t get there at all.

Now like everyone else in these trying times, the guys at eSigns aren’t spending money needlessly; and at first blush, it might seem like an extravagance to fly someone in to profile a brand new printer that might even have just been profiled by the guy who set it up.

Well, here’s the thing: I’ve known a lot of printer technicians in my day and while a lot of them are very good techs, none of them are color management experts. Many of them even hate color profiling. They’ll make you a profile or two, but by the time they do, the install is done and their flight leaves at 3.35 and as often as not they’re already mentally halfway to the airport.

Well, I flew up and profiled the machine and here’s the difference:

This is an actual and completely unretouched or altered iPhone picture. The one on the right is “before” and the one on the left is “after.”

No editing or altering of the printed image either. The customer file was a .pdf and we just sent it directly to the printer though Onyx. Both images were printed with the exact same file.

What’s obvious here is the background color–which is absolutely nailed here with no modifications to the file on the first try in the image on the left.

If you look at the inset picture though and all you had was the image on the right, you might think it was okay; and this photo loses some of the subtlety, but note the concrete. In the image on the left, it’s neutral and looks just like the concrete it’s sitting on, but in the image on the right, it’s got a little bit of a cast. The same cast you can pick up in the grey background by the dog’s ear.

So what’s the bottom line?

Bottom line is the client loved the color and eSigns has a big new client now. A new client that more than paid for the profiling session. Not to mention that now the machine is profiled to give them these results not just for this client, but on every job they send to it.

Just further proof that cutting corners isn’t always the path to success, even in trying times.