Color Management, What is it really??

[Luc St-Pierre]

Mike
Your resumé is fantastic. I realize, funny anecdotes apart, that there is some problem with communicating the real strings of color management. I will never get tired or bored at learning more and more about color...that's my bread and butter. Passsing it along to some people that don't seem to have any ears for it is the most boring part of it.

[Banditto1]

Color management is the technical art that you simply can't teach most designers or customers, they use various vendors and resources, so typically it's why we all have jobs. The guy with the CREO RIP is going to a different result than the guy with the FIREY. You just have to know your bones.

[Mike Strickler]

Color management is the technical art that you simply can't teach most designers or customers, they use various vendors and resources, so typically it's why we all have jobs. The guy with the CREO RIP is going to a different result than the guy with the FIREY. You just have to know your bones.

I agree to some extent. The art is knowing just which parts to teach each person. In general, each person needs specific skills and just enough extra information to give them a sense of where their task fits into the system so they see its importance. What you don't want to do is burden them with information they don't need and can't use. The object, after all, is to make everybody's work easier. But now we're having a useful discussion: We're thinking about how what things we must know. What should we teach to the designer, the prepress manager, the pressman? It's different in each case. But you're already ahead of the game; most shops don't give this issue any thought at all, and without this first step color management will never be fully and consistently implemented.

Feel free to contact me for further assistance.

Mike Strickler
MSP Graphic Services
IDEAliance G7 Expert
707.664.1628
www.mspgraphics.com

[disbellj]

Right Mike. Because (if they know the term color management) color management may mean something different to each one. GRACoL looks at the press. But there are also things that need to be done by those upstream to get the job ready for press. Thing is, most customers, and even those in the building, I deal with in Commercial Printing, are ignorant of color management. If it wasn't for SWOP profile being used as default in Adobe and Quark programs (and I set sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as default to use, since I receive the files but don't make them, and most files are sRGB that come to me untagged RGB), I would have had many more color problems. With the SWOP separation, anyone should be able to use this separation in prepress (no matter what substrate) and get to their printing condition (which should be defined by ISO most likely).

The problem is education in honoring profiles (simple: always honor RGB profiles, if you don't need to convert incoming CMYK because of Ink Limit, don't), soft-proofing (use the output profile and Relative Coolorimetric Intent), and separation (Relative Colorimetric Intent with same profile soft-proofed with, simple settings that shouldn't be that different from printer to printer), and hardcopy proofng (only place where we can use Absolute Colorimetric Intent, because doing so on files before this screws up whites that should be 0,0,0,0 CMYK plated), so that customers' expectations can be set realistically from the design stage. At least X-Rite is trying to communicate with customers, but most people like to make excuses and not change, since it's easier to do that than change (or at least they think, but it's not so in this case).

So all we can do as prepress is to make is easy as possible knowing what should be (ISO standards) and what most likely has been done (people for the most part don't ever change the defaults when making separations, which is good, since it gives us the "what has happened most likely" ICC profiles to use as source if one is not embedded, then use ISO ICC profile for the specific paper type if you must convert incoming CMYK because of Total Ink being too high). This helps us to get it right as close as possible even when dealing with those that are not or don't want to be educated in color management. Because frankly, people don't want to be educated, they just want it to work and look close for the most part. If someone has color critical customers, then color management will satisfy them as long as they are willing to get and implement a small amount of education an spending on the tools that make the easy possible.

See, where I come from, colors had to be picked by a color professional, and rounds of proofs done to get to the right color. For me to see it going from that to being able to use a spectro, plug in captured Lab values, try a couple different rendering intents on a couple color swatches to get to closest possible match, and we now have targets for each paper type internationally, then I'd say we have come a long way, and we can make it work unless the customer's expectation is to have a bright vibrant color print on an uncoated paper, which is not possible and people could be shown this by PANTONE's guides - coated vs uncoated, same PMS color.

If a prepress person will learn and implement color management correctly, even if everybody else in the process chooses to remain ignorant of color management (and I speak from experience), their work life would be smoothed out and simplified to a point where color problems are few and far between. Only when a color needs matched (easy, as talked about in this post), or a customer expectation is unrealistic (also talked about in this post, and a couple proofs of the same "best" CMYK numbers - one proof simulating coated, one proof simulating uncoated - usually stops that wrong expectation in it's tracks) in fact.

Regards,

Don

I agree to some extent. The art is knowing just which parts to teach each person. In general, each person needs specific skills and just enough extra information to give them a sense of where their task fits into the system so they see its importance. What you don't want to do is burden them with information they don't need and can't use. The object, after all, is to make everybody's work easier. But now we're having a useful discussion: We're thinking about how what things we must know. What should we teach to the designer, the prepress manager, the pressman? It's different in each case. But you're already ahead of the game; most shops don't give this issue any thought at all, and without this first step color management will never be fully and consistently implemented.

Feel free to contact me for further assistance.

Mike Strickler
MSP Graphic Services
IDEAliance G7 Expert
707.664.1628
MSP Graphic Services: Prepress and Color Management

[dpolglaze]

Maybe I am getting old, but 2010 is two days away and "Real World Color Management" was published in 2004. Is there something newer that anyone knows about? I realize the concepts and theories are the same, but practice on specific devices, experience and work with experts cannot be substituted with a book. I am going to order the book because experts have recommended it. I hope to have the chance to gain more expertise in the future. Thank you all for your comments...

Dwight Polglaze
Production Print and Digital Color Workflow Spec.
...naively looking for my last job
Resume of Dwight Polglaze

[dpolglaze]

All of the discussion is great and all is valid! If the clients heard us all talking like this we would be in big trouble.

I have worked with digital color for years and the one comment I make when beginning to "train" a client is this: Color controllers are color blind and so are up to 10% of humans (slight exaggeration). This has always worked very well in starting the discussion and leading it into the right areas.

Also, it's imperative that anyone working with color (operators, trainers, systems engineers, support people, designers, pre-press) test their own color-blindness regularly. Do it with an optometrist or ophthalmologist once every few years and make periodic checks with one of the many web sites available---just Google it and you'll find a bunch.

Use it in good health!

Dwight

[otherthoughts]

All of the discussion is great and all is valid! If the clients heard us all talking like this we would be in big trouble.

I have worked with digital color for years and the one comment I make when beginning to "train" a client is this: Color controllers are color blind and so are up to 10% of humans (slight exaggeration). This has always worked very well in starting the discussion and leading it into the right areas.

Also, it's imperative that anyone working with color (operators, trainers, systems engineers, support people, designers, pre-press) test their own color-blindness regularly. Do it with an optometrist or ophthalmologist once every few years and make periodic checks with one of the many web sites available---just Google it and you'll find a bunch.

Use it in good health!

Dwight

This link to an earlier thread on this forum, many found interesting and speaks to your color perception comments Test your Color IQ

Regards-OT

[Lukas Engqvist]

The munzel test is much more important that a "simple" colour blindness test. And lighting is so important.

[graficworx]

I understand the basics of color management if you are printing in house, but what if you send out your print jobs? I send out a lot of print work to trade publishers. I am finding that I cannot adequately proof my jobs in-house before I send them out, and I would like a way to do this. I have looked into the Epson Stylus pro line and ColorBurst RIP. Anyone have any experience with any of these. Also, I would like to calibrate my monitors as well to eliminate as much skew as possible. I know that it is impossible to get the same on screen and off because of RGB/CMYK, but I would like it to be a little closer than it currently is. I use Macs and CS for al my work. Does any one have any recommendations for screen calibration?

Thanks,

- Don

[Correct Color]

Does any one have any recommendations for screen calibration?

You can't go wrong with Color Eyes Display Pro. Other than that, I'd personally recommend you steer way clear of the Huey. Also, for some odd reason, the Eye One Display/Eye One Match combo has a weird tendency to occasionally make pinkish profiles on Macs. If it was me and I was just profiling a monitor, I'd go with CED Pro and the Optix 94.

As for the Epson ColorBurst combo, I've worked with several iterations of it and always been pleased with the results. Remember though that if you're serious about proofing you'll need to profile the printer, and if you do you'll probably buy an Eye-One spectro. If you do, you can use it to profile your monitor and not need to buy a puck. And while it's not quite as robust as CED Pro in my opinion, Eye-One Match will make you a good solid profile as long as you use it with an Eye-One spectro.

Just as my personal take on the rest of the thread: There are some bright guys here with some very well informed and well-thought out contributions.

Only thing I'd add is to emphasize that what we consider to be color management isn't really color management at all. It's numbers management.

Computers are stupid. They don't know the first thing about color, they can't interpret what we want, and the only thing they understand is numbers.

In order to process any image with a computer, the first step is to digitize it, which literally means to turn it into numbers.

Further since it's just simply a fact that no two devices that reproduce digital color are going to reproduce it exactly the same, the only way to get control of the process is to characterize how each device in your color path actually produces colors based on the numbers it receives, and then put each characterization in its place. And that's what we call 'color management.'

Once it's in place, it's like GPS. Here's where I started; here's my path; here's my destination.

And you'll get there every time.

Mike Adams
Correct Color