Should Creatives Learn Color Management?

Out of Gamut: Should Creatives Learn Color Management?
Sometimes it's a question of what you don't need to know, Bruce Fraser By Bruce Fraser, creativepro contributing editor

For the past few months I've been writing about making color management work -- including describing any end-runs we can make around this rather unintuitive process. In response to my last column, in which I described how to soft proof files in Adobe Photoshop, Bob Oswin, President of 5th Ave. Color Printz, wrote:
"End users are looking for a definitive set of profiles that can produce a standard range of colors over current output devices. Presses are one of them only. It would not be a stretch for Adobe et al. to form a huddle and come up with the prepress standard, the separation standard, the laser -printer standard, and the ink jet standard. I believe manufacturers would rush to meet such criteria. As it stands, everybody has to become a quasi-expert on imagers, cameras, scanners, monitors, etc. before they can even randomly pick a profile for output."

I can certainly sympathize with this view, but much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, it ain't gonna happen anytime soon. Some of the reasons are purely technical. It simply isn't possible to make a profile that will produce equally good results on a sheetfed press with coated stock, a newspaper press with newsprint, and a web press printing a magazine. Color separations that work well on a sheetfed job will result in mud in a magazine, and a potentially life-threatening situation on a newspaper press. (If you've ever seen a press web break, you know what I'm talking about-klaxons blare and workers don hard hats.)

Here Come the Color Jets
But presses are far from the only problem. Color laser printing is an inherently variable technology that's highly sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and humidity. The latest generation of color laser printers is substantially more stable than previous ones, but it's still common to find a 10-percent variation in the magenta output between morning and afternoon. When it comes to inkjets, all the vendors are currently falling over themselves trying to come up with inks that last more than a few months.

On the high-end inkjets, we'll probably see archival pigmented inks from several different vendors later this year, and at the low end, we'll see a mixture of different offerings, some based on pigments, some on dyes with better stability than the current round. It's a near-certainty that each vendor's inks will be substantially different from their competitors as each one makes their own trade-off between a large gamut and a print that lasts.

Ambient 1: Music for Standards
You want standards? We got lots of 'em! Mentioning SNAP, GraCOL, and SWOP virtually guarantees a cheap laugh at speaking engagements. (They stand for "Standards for Non-Heatset Advertising Printing," "General requirements for applications in Commercial Offset Lithography," and "Specifications for Web Offset Press," respectively.) But meeting those standards on press is an uncertain enterprise. The standards are necessarily fairly loose, since they have to accommodate a wide variety of presses and paper stocks. A bigger problem, though, is that the printing trade in the U.S.A. has never been a standards-driven endeavor. America is still the land of the rugged individualist, and few press operators are inclined to take pains to meet a standard that they know their press can exceed-as anyone who has watched a grizzled press operator standing on the pressroom floor arguing with an autoscanning colorimeter can readily attest!

In short, print suppliers and composite-color printer vendors want their processes to print better than anyone else's rather than the same as everyone else's. This pretty much rules out any kind of definitive standards-based profiles.

Taking Color Mountain by Strategy
The real problem is not that we've made color reproduction harder. Rather, one of the unforeseen consequences of desktop publishing technology is that it took a big wooden spoon and thoroughly mixed the traditional workflows and the traditional areas of responsibility. Color used to be handled in closed-loop environments by trained craftsmen. We're now trying to do open-loop color to a much more diverse range of output processes, and in a great many cases, creatives are forced to take on more production responsibilities than they ever wanted or envisaged.

Does this mean that, as Mr. Oswin fears, designers and other creatives have to "become a quasi-expert on imagers, cameras scanners, monitors, etc., before they can even randomly pick a profile for output" or is there a middle ground? If you're in the top few percent of your field, you can probably get away with simply focussing on design, and letting someone else actually turn the work into something that can be manufactured. But the work had better be extraordinary, otherwise you'll just get a reputation for not understanding the medium for which you're producing the design, and your clients will go to someone who doesn't have that reputation.

Another Green Page
So just how much do creatives need to know about color management? Well, if you're designing for print, you should at least have seen a printing press in action at some time in your life. Actually seeing both the amount of variation on a typical press run, and the amount of correction possible on press, is an invaluable reality check. What else?


You should understand that, without color management, RGB or CMYK numbers do not represent specific colors: for example, C 73 M0 Y 86 K0 may produce a pastel green on a sheetfed press, a dark, saturated green on newsprint, and a grayish green on a color laser printer.

You should understand that the only way to reproduce the vast majority of Pantone colors is to get the printer to mix the specific ink and apply it as a spot color.

You should understand that if you're asked to produce CMYK color without being told something about the printing conditions, the results will necessarily be approximate.
In fact, these are things you need to know whether you use color management or not - they fall into the category of basic understanding of the medium. When it comes to color management itself, you need to know more than you probably want, but less than you probably fear.

No Pussyfooting
Unless someone supplies you with a press profile and tells you to use it, you can safely forget about profiling presses - not even the most rabid color management evangelist expects creatives to do that. For CMYK output, an entirely reasonable fallback position is to use a generic profile for a proofing system such as Imation MatchPrint, Fuji ColorArt, or Agfa AgfaProof. Unlike desktop color printers or offset presses, proofing systems are designed from the start to be very stable, and to have each proofer behave exactly like the others, which makes them a very good candidate for generic profiles. And since pretty much every commercial printer in the United States prides themselves on their ability to match a Matchprint, the print job should work just fine.

You need to make a profile for your monitor - a visual tool such as Adobe Gamma or the ColorSync calibrator will get you into the ballpark and will do a better job than any canned monitor profile. If you use a desktop color printer for comps, you need a profile for it too - the vendor-supplied ones usually work well enough as long as you use the vendor's inks and paper - and you need to understand how to use profiles to make your composite printer simulate the final output. You need to understand the four rendering intents specified by the ICC - they're just different ways of handling out-of-gamut colors - and when to use each one.

Before and After Color Science
The steepest part of the learning curve is learning how to control color management in each of your key applications. Right now this is frankly a mess. Each application has its own user interface and its own terminology, and some apps have more capabilities than others. This situation can only improve. One day we'll actually have the same user interface for color in all Adobe's applications, rather than the confusing mess we have now where the color controls in PageMaker, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop don't even begin to resemble each other. Color management may have progressed beyond the 1.0 stage, but we can fairly characterize it as 1.1.1. We know that it works from a technical standpoint, but we still have a long way to go in terms of usability.

At some point in the future, color management will simply go away from the standpoint of the creative user. Devices will be self-calibrating and smart enough to know their own capabilities, and we'll all be sending PDF files to PostScript 3 RIPs (or 4, or 5) that will handle the conversions automatically.
But these things always take longer than we want or expect. It may take ten years, it will certainly take five. In the meantime, each of us just has to find our own comfort level with this powerful but often irritating technology.

source:creativepro