Managing Color Phoenix AZ

Digital color management is sort of like mapping where you are and where you're going in the color-printing arena. That's sometimes how Mike Adams, owner of Correct Color, Austin, TX, refers to his job. Adams is a consultant for complete workflow color management in the wide, large, and grand-format arena. He has anecdotal evidence that when a shop hires him for color management on all machines, applications, processes, and media in the workflow, it is money well spent.

"You can't send some guy in with a spectrophotometer in to make a couple of profiles and have a color-management problem solved," Adams said. "A typical project for me is I go in someplace and they have whatever varying degrees of color problems or no color problems and just want to be better. I design their color workflow from beginning to end. I make profiles of all of their machines on all the media that they print in all the resolutions they print in and whatever RIP they have and do all the settings."

He also helps print shops control color coming from customers, too. And he has a guarantee. "It's on my website and I tell it to everybody I deal with: 'If you don't think it's the best money you ever spent, when I'm done, you don't have to pay me.'" Everyone has paid him.

Adams says he figures that most printers can halve their time and resources with good color management. Most are at 50 percent of their potential capacity before he consults and fine-tunes their color-management system. "You go into most places and if they have a typical situation, they're getting some stuff CMYK and some stuff RGB and they don't really know there are differing CMYK and RGB spaces," Adams said. "They might have a couple of designers who heard that Adobe 1998 is a better color space, so they set their machines to it and don't bother to tell the rest of the class. So all this stuff is going through and it's not coming out correct. They're RIPing the stuff and it's not printing right. They're doing test samples and what have you. They're spending a bunch of time trying to correct to some color that they're not going to print...I walk into most places and I would say that they're running at 50 percent capacity."

Adams makes ICC profiles so when a customer gives the print shop a color job, it's going to go through the workflow consistently. "I'm just creating workflow and creating consistent color workflow," Adams said, "which, when they're through, then if somebody gives them a PMS color tagged in Corel Draw and they take it, maybe, through Illustrator to their RIP and finally, the color value or the lab value that Corel Draw expected that color to be is the same lab value that Illustrator expects it to be and is the same lab value that the RIP expected it to be."

Color-profile management is something beyond using a spectrophotometer to make a profile on the raster image processor, Adams said. Yes, that can be done, he says, "but are they really good at setting single-channel ink limits or are they really doing linearization correctly or are they really good at setting multi-channel ink limits? When all that's done, you have the profile and then grade. How do you put it in place and how do you take the profile and place it on every design station, so the designers can all use the individual profiles as soft proofs so they can work in a color gamut that encompasses every bit of ability of every bit of all of the printers to print and have one color space that works all the way through with all their applications? And they know what color they're getting from the previous application and keep it the same all the way through and then it goes to the RIP and the RIP prints the color correctly, so that's complete color workflow management from beginning to end."

Front End Most Challenging

Adams' tools include software that is not commonly use and he uses differing software depending on his customer's applications. He also says the front end is the most common problem with color management.

"Right now, the applications are pretty much made to guarantee that you fail," Adams said. The color information and defaults from program to program are different, so color can change. And information about how that occurs is not widely-circulated. "There is not anyplace you can go and really read every bit of this information," he said. "Help files are just written terribly."

In addition, programs have their own challenges. "This is a bleeding-edge business, and I don't care what machine it is or what RIP it is, the fact of the matter is that everything is released before it's ready and everybody in this business is, to some extent, a beta tester," Adams said. "That can put some people at a tremendous disadvantage sometimes."

Neal McChristy is a freelance writer who has written about the office-equipment industry for 12 years. He welcomes feedback and would like to have suggestions about future topics. Contact him at nmcchristy@cox.net and his website is www.ezsnailmail.com