A: Well we'd answer that with a question back at you: Doesn't it make perfect sense if it solves your color issues once and for all? To put it in perspective, a round-trip ticket to just about anywhere from Austin costs less than one roll of any brand of 60" vehicle-wrap vinyl. The real question is how much money you're spending on wasted time and materials and lost customers by not having a fully color-managed workflow.

Q: If I've got good printer profiles, I've got color management, right?

A: Not really. Or to be more precise, not at all. Since computers and printers only know color as numbers, you have to be using some sort of print space profile in order to even get a print. But a profile is like a roadmap. If you want to make a map to a destination you obviously can't do it unless you know your starting point. No matter how good they might or might not be, printer profiles have no idea where you're coming from. So what you wind up being is not so much color managed as managed by the search for color.

Q: Profiles came with my RIP. Aren't they good enough?

A: It depends. Some--frankly--are a lot better than others. Of course all of them have the limitations outlined above. Also, all of them were made by someone. A someone who had to set the ink limits and all the other variables that are necessary to create a profile; and those variable settings may or may not be ideal for your particular environment and what you're trying to achieve.

Q: I downloaded profiles online. Aren't they good enough?

A: See above. But to amplify, every printer profile is only good for one set of exacting conditions, and it's only really an accurate snapshot of how a particular machine reproduced color in those particular conditions. With the explosion of new printers and media, and even new RIPs, it's assured that no one anywhere in the industry has available to them every possible combination that can be profiled, so what's out there may not be what you need.

Further, all profile-making engines are not created equal. We consider one far superior to all the others, and it isn't at all the most popular one. In fact your odds of getting a profile made with this engine in a download are pretty slim. Add to that the fact that since no one posting profiles online has at their disposal all the combinations of machines, RIPs, resolutions and media that would be necessary to compile a complete catalogue, and you wind up with profiles made here and there, by different people in different conditions and using different profile-making engines and philosophies, so that what you tend to get is a pretty mixed bag of results.

Q: My color shifts from application to application, but that's unavoidable, right?

A: No. It's not unavoidable. In fact it absolutely is avoidable. It's possible to get from Corel Draw to Photoshop to your RIP, for instance, and keep the color exactly the same throughout. Not only the same but appearing the same on your screen as well. Getting control of color at its inception and keeping control of it until print time is the actuality of true color management.

Q: You're telling me I can go from Corel Draw to Photoshop or Illustrator and my color will stay exactly the same?

A: Yup. Other way around too.

Q: It's not possible for all my monitors to match, is it?

A: Frankly, monitor profiling is still something of a black art, and you can get some wildly differing opinions on how it should be done. We have our own theories here at Correct Color, and they're the result of some pretty extensive testing and trial and error. Bottom line is that yes, it is possible for all your monitors to match. Most likely though to get an absolute, true, dead-on, 100% match will be more cost and effort than you want to spend for the result.

However, it's possible to get pretty close pretty reasonably, and it's possible to get absolutely consistent. Our rule of thumb is that the first 90% is very doable in just about every instance based on just doing good profiles on the monitors you've got, based on some theories you have to use us to learn. Most folks are so pleased to get to this point that going further, such as painting walls a particular gray, or wearing a certain color clothes to work, or buying really expensive full-gamut monitors winds up being overkill.

Q: Well it's never going to be possible for my monitors to match what I print, is it?

A: To some extent that answer above applies as well. But the bottom-line real-world answer tends to be that yes, you can get your monitors to match what you print. Granted, never exactly. But surprisingly close, and absolutely predictably. Predictably enough that once you're completely color-managed you'll trust your monitor every time, and you'll feel absolutely confident of what your image will look like when you send it to print.

Q: In every application?

A: In every application that's color aware.

Q: Most of my customers aren't all that picky about color, why should I bother with color management?

A: Our answer would be that there actually is a right way and a wrong way to do digital printing. Unfortunately, there are so many different applications, so many different ways to do things that get a result but aren't right, so many poorly-written manuals and help files out there that it's almost impossible to set up a workflow that is right from beginning to end without help from a color workflow expert. You may be getting product out the door, and you may not have people complaining about color, but you are a professional in a business, and we'd answer by saying that as in anything, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Q: Some of my customers are extremely picky about color. Is it possible for them to see on their screens what we're going to print as well?

Yes. It is. One of the major features of correct color management is that all the pieces can be thought of as completely transportable and interchangeable modules. There's a common misconception in the industry that various elements of a workflow have to be "calibrated" to match other elements of a workflow--such as a monitor to a specific printer--in order for color management to work. But that isn't the case. What is needed is an accurate roadmap of how every device in a workflow reproduces color information it is given. Once that's done, the roadmaps are all just put "in the glovebox" of the computer for applications to call on as needed.

So there's no reason why you can't introduce your most discriminating clients to correct color management, have their monitors profiled, put your machine profiles in place in their gloveboxes and then even give them shortcuts to where they are. And it doesn't matter whether they're next door or halfway around the world. What they'll see is what you'll print.

And it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to see that once this is all done, these customers will likely be very reluctant to change suppliers.

Q: I don't have any color issues. Sure I spend time rebuilding colors in customer files and printing test strips. Who doesn't? It's just part of the business, right?

A: Our customers don't. It may be part of the business, but that doesn't mean it has to be. If you're spending any time worrying about color as color, thinking about color as color, working to correct color from what you get to what you want it to be, you have color issues.

Q: If I hire you, will I hit every PMS color with my printers when you're done?

A: Sorry, no. The PMS library is a library of spot colors, and no non-spot color printing device can hit them all. We can promise though that you'll get every bit of gamut your machines have got to give on every media you use when we're done.

In certain industries, such as the sign industry, PMS colors are a huge source of confusion and frustration, as the whole vocabulary and usage and language of PMS colors comes from the printing industry and unfortunately, most sign-makers with a huge new investment in a large or grand format printer didn't grow up in the printing industry.

Well, we did. And what we can promise is that if you're mystified and frustrated by PMS colors, we'll show you how to work with them, how to answer your clients' questions about them, and how to be sure that you're the folks in your industry in your area that the customers know are "on top of it" and know what they're talking about.

Q: I don't want a lot of extra complicated steps in my workflow. We're making it work now, why should I change?

A: In actuality once your workflow is completely color managed, there are usually less steps and they are less complicated than what you were doing before. We put everything in place and make presets in all your applications so that color control is pretty automatic and 'one-click.' Most folks find it's more simple, more intuitive, more elegant and considerably less overall effort than what they were doing before.

Q: A profile's a profile, right?

A: No. Emphatically no. Every ICC profile is a snapshot of a device and how it rendered color from information received when it was in a particular state. That state is determined by the physical and atmospheric conditions in the place in which the device is located, as well as the adjustable parameters given to the device by the individual making the profile. For instance, a printer profile made with low ink limits will be a valid ICC profile that will properly transmit color information to a machine, but it will never achieve the full gamut of which the machine is capable. Likewise, a profile that is made with over-aggressive ink limits may produce a large color gamut for that machine, but it might have trouble holding gray balance.

Those are two examples but there are hundreds of variables, coming down to the simply the experience and "color-eye" of the individual making the profiles, as well as the limitations of the physical device the individual may be using as well as the software used to create the profile.

Q: What's to stop me from just buying an Eye-One and doing this myself?

A: About the same thing that's stopping you from going out and buying some paint and brushes and painting the Mona Lisa.

Q: You're just kidding about that guarantee, right?

A: Nope.

Q: Has anyone ever not paid you?

A: Not yet.