Opinion of Quark 8

[Glenn McDowall]

Today is a good example -- I have an XPress 8 job with Photoshop EPS placed. Not a problem for me, but I sure feel sorry for the designer who used circa 1995 techniques to composite all the overlaying imagery in Photoshop. They could have assembled all that in the layout if using Indy, in a fraction of the time. Anyway, that's not the real prepress issue here. This time around, the job did not match the color of the last time, not even close. I was elected to investigate.

My discovery: if a Photoshop EPS has a profile attached, XPress re-separates the image, even though it's already CMYK. I'm not shocked by that. Some workflows have the same tendancy. The part that shocks me is how terrible of a job it does. The color management module in Quark 8 is horrible. Even when all the correct profiles are aligned (we shoot for GRACoL G7), the program produces garbage. The color was mangled.

The result of my investigation is that the earlier job did NOT have any profiles saved in the Photoshop EPS files, so XPress left the images alone and they looked great. This time, with profiles embedded in the EPS files, XPress did it's ugly thing.

Does Indy do this? I don't even know. But I'll say this: I have all profiles set (as I tried to replicate in XPress, to no avail), and when I process jobs using Indy with placed Photoshop elements, profile set or not, there isn't any mangling of color. If Indy is re-separating, it's doing a damn good job of it, to the point that no one notices.


William Campbell
Revere Graphics Portland Oregon USA
william@rgraphics.com

Excellent post William.
I don't want to defend Quark's color management, which seems to be only half thought through. I'm not even sure of the decision processes it makes but in your example I see it like this.

Postscript doesn't support ICC profiles so when you save an EPS it can't embed the profile directly in the EPS (maybe it tags it so Photoshop/Indesign/Quark can use it) so to get round this you select the checkbox Postscript Color Management. Now when you bring this object into Quark, Quark will class this no longer as CMYK but XYZ. At this point you are stuffed because however you choose to get this back to cmyk its going to involve an unwanted 4-3-4 conversion. If you choose cmyk as your output space in quark then quark will do it, if you choose As Is, then Distiller will change it to Postscript CIE Based DEFG CSA Profile but the original cmyk separations are gone.

If you tell me that Photoshop's Postscript Color Management checkbox wasn't checked, and Quark still messed your separations I'm not going to be completely surprised but I didn't think it would mess the numbers in a cmyk EPS unless you told it to in the Preferences, or it gets caught in transparency flattening.

ICC (in and out) is another of Quark's weaknesses it can bring them in and convert or remove on output but because its postscript based it can't pass them through like InDesign. Sometimes this would be a good thing as its one less thing to go wrong in the RIP

[dpig69]

I learned how to use Quark before Indesign had been invented. I never did learn Indesign because I work at a print shop now and we only accept PDF's. PDF jobs created by Quark can work great IF the designer is very experienced and familiar with the printing industry. But PDF files made from Quark "amateurs" are often horrible. I have found that PDFs created from Indesign by amateurs are much more forgiving and useable.