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Ray Prince |
December 18, 2008
Plate inspection Question: We are a 50-employee printing company that concentrates on commercial work. Is it necessary to inspect plates prior to mounting...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGQ&A sponsored by IBM-Ricoh joint venture |
drupa 2008
Bill Esler |
June 16, 2008
How Green Was My drupa? Not very. With 391,000 attendees and 1,800 exhibitors in 18 halls, the event had the carbon footprint of a small nation. Especially given the conti...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGThe global show of paper and printing technologies in Dusseldorf, Germany. |
Graph Expo 2008
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Bill Esler |
October 30, 2008
Show of a Thousand Small Things Top questions at Graph Expo: Can I retrofit that? Can I get it used? Can you finance it? This was the show of a thousan...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGDigital printing and offset printing, finishing, mailing, wide-format production technology, education news and conference news for Graph Expo 2008, the printing industry's largest U.S. gathering this year. |
PluggedIn
Stephen Beals |
December 19, 2008
Will Apple's Absence Hurt Print Developers? Steve Jobs will not show up at MacWorld next months. Bad news for MacWorld's parent company IDG, but probably no serious loss for developers. Altho...... More ABOUT THIS BLOG |
Premedia Trends
Brian Lawler |
December 21, 2008
Spranq Eco Sans font As all bloggers probably do, I read the blogs (I have to keep up with the competition!). And, the blog topic that is getting the most attention thi...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGWorkflow, process, and imaging trends |
Print Sales Call
Bill Farquharson |
December 11, 2008
Your price is too high Good question from a coaching customer today: "Many of my long time customers are calling and looking for pricing on repeat jobs. These wer...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGSelling printing, services, and managing sales |
Print Shop Talk
Mark Vruno |
November 14, 2008
Ascend to the Great White North If you're a short-run printer who didn't make it to Chicago for Graph Expo last month, consider heading north to Toronto next week for North Americ...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGLetters to Editor |
Print Shop Talk
Lisa Cross |
November 4, 2008
Economic Myths Debunked A working paper authored by three economists for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reports that four claims about the nation’s current ...... More ABOUT THIS BLOG |
Print Spotting
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Bill Esler |
December 11, 2008
Rapid changes as economy weakens "The U.S. economy is deteriorating more rapidly than expected," reads the morning newspaper, and the litany of layoffs and closures is ha...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGIndustry and social trends affecting the commercial printing sector. |
Print Trends, sponsored by Epson
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Howie Fenton |
December 19, 2008
Web-to-print and Consultative Sales In the NAPL Digital Services Study we have been discussing, we learned that successful companies understood the importance of shifting sales st...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGPrint Trends, sponsored by Epson |
The rise of RGB
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Brian Lawler |
December 18, 2008
The Teenage Print Shop While cleaning up the mess I call my office yesterday, I found a wonderful relic from my childhood. It is the type sampler from the Teenage Print S...... More ABOUT THIS BLOGFor years, RGB color has been treated as a pariah color space by most printers and prepress people. Even today, Adobe InDesign will flag documents with embedded RGB images as having “errors.”With the rise of electronic publishing, and publishing in multiple media – print on sheet-fed, print on newsprint, PDF, etc. – it has become more common to see documents created in RGB, and converted to CMYK only when going to press. This makes sense. Digital cameras and scanners generate RGB files with a large color gamut. We use these digital color images in almost every document, and we should be taking advantage of the extraordinary color qualities of the images. And, as a larger number of documents are published electronically, we should be leaving color in its original space for those documents that are made into PDF. Such documents look and print better on desktop printers than the same documents with images converted to CMYK. There is another compelling reason for using RGB images in documents destined for print: converting to CMYK should be done with the specific press/paper/ink combination in mind. So, keeping color in its original space until the time of platesetting makes great sense. Then – and only then – choose an ICC profile that is fine-tuned to the printing parameters of the job. Then, as is often the case, if the paper changes, or the job needs to be reprinted on another press, the only thing that need be changed is the output profile at the time of platesetting. Many printers think that SWOP is an appropriate profile for sheet-fed printing (Adobe sets SWOP as default in its Creative Suite applications). It most definitely is not, and there are much better profiles that are better-suited to sheet-fed printing. SWOP is a compromise for sheet-fed printers, and those who use it are short-changing their customers of some of the best color available on their presses. When imaging plates for sheet-fed printing, it is much better to choose an appropriate sheet-fed profile that allows for the best qualities of sheet-fed printing to show. Caveat coloro But leaving the images in a publication in their original color space only works if the page layout person acknowledges the embedded profiles that are in most images today. All consumer digital cameras are factory-set to use the sRGB color space, while better cameras allow the photographer to change the color space to a larger gamut (like Adobe RGB 1998). When these cameras write images to the memory card, they embed the profile into those images, establishing a color pedigree. If everyone who touches the images in the reproduction chain is respectful of the embedded profiles, then output to CMYK is certain to be better than any generic conversion of color into CMYK. Making device-specific PDF files Once a document is complete, the operator can apply the correct ICC profile as the PDF is generated. This makes it relatively easy to prepare files for print or electronic delivery. If a document is headed to the web for electronic delivery, then an RGB profile is applied to the PDF; if the job is headed to a printing press, then the correct ICC profile for CMYK is applied. Heresy? Just about now, some will shout “Heresy!” I promise – it’s a good idea to adopt an RGB work flow (where source images are provided in RGB color) and then deliver CMYK or RGB color finished work according to the output intent. This is the new era of document delivery, and we must be flexible to survive and prosper in this era. |
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