Is color management really needed?

[gordo]

I know this is heresy but....
It occurs to me that no special color management is needed for print application - at least when working with Apple products. I've been designing brochures, annual reports, advertisements, etc. (some have won print excellence awards) using apps like PhotoShop and InDesign and Quark on Apple laptops since 1998 or so and have never had an issue with color. The first time I see color is on the printshop suppied contract proof and then the final presswork. When I do newspaper work the first time I see color is at the news stand.
Odd? Or have modern display technologies, at least from Apple, eliminated the color management gymnastics needed with the old CRTs.?

Gordo

 

[Stephen Marsh]

To clarify, do you mean to say that the colour displayed on your uncalibrated and unprofiled laptop displayed through colour managed applications appears reasonably close to proofs and final prints?

So the default laptop monitor profile is pretty good and the hardware is consistent?

It is not as if there is zero colur management taking place anywhere on your system!

Stephen Marsh

 

[Deleted member 16349]

I know this is heresy but....
It occurs to me that no special color management is needed for print application - at least when working with Apple products. I've been designing brochures, annual reports, advertisements, etc. (some have won print excellence awards) using apps like PhotoShop and InDesign and Quark on Apple laptops since 1998 or so and have never had an issue with color. The first time I see color is on the printshop suppied contract proof and then the final presswork. When I do newspaper work the first time I see color is at the news stand.
Odd? Or have modern display technologies, at least from Apple, eliminated the color management gymnastics needed with the old CRTs.?

Gordo

Maybe you're colour blind and don't know it.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Maybe your colour blind and don't know it.

Paging Mr Ishihara, is there a Mr Ishihara in the building?

Stephen Marsh

 

[Al Ferrari]

No wonder your commercial printers love you. You'll accept anything!

Al

 

[gordo]

To clarify, do you mean to say that the colour displayed on your uncalibrated and unprofiled laptop displayed through colour managed applications appears reasonably close to proofs and final prints?

So the default laptop monitor profile is pretty good and the hardware is consistent?

It is not as if there is zero colur management taking place anywhere on your system!

Stephen Marsh

Yup, that's right.

 

[gordo]

Maybe your colour blind and don't know it.

I've been test several times over the years and passed with flying colors.

Gordo

 

[gordo]

No wonder your commercial printers love you. You'll accept anything!

Al

Not at all. The projects were very color and quality critical.

You don't win Benny awards for crap work.

 

[ajr]

As long as it looks good to the eye thats the best colour management you can have I suppose the knack is making sure the 1st copy and the 1,000,000th copy look the same. Consistency!

A

 

[Point918]

Agree with Gordo that Apple products are pretty good at displaying achievable color.

Problem I have seen repeatedly over the last 25 years is when a designer shows the customer output from their uncalibrated wide gamut desktop printer on stock nothing like the job is printing on. Customer loves the color which becomes the target for the proof/press. Got one just today........

Most but not all creative people don't have the budget, knowledge or desire to deal with color management. Vendors have made unfulfilled color nirvana promises for years. Many printers won't adhere to a standard for competitive or financial reasons.

Internally color management is essential to our profitability and sanity!

 

[mattbeals]

One of the guys that I worked with color corrected in black and white. This was 15 or 18 years ago. He'd adjust each channel as needed using curves and levels. It was crazy, but he did it. And the printed pieces looked great. Too bad he died and took his secrets with him. We didn't have any real color management in the shop. Didn't profile monitors. Just calibrated the Iris, dupont water proofs and Dolev 800.

 

[rich apollo]

Where is the dislike button!?

The default monitor settings are okay, but the color fidelity can be improved.

Color management is necessary for print. Color management is happening in your processes, but you are not controlling it.

 

[gordo]

Where is the dislike button!?

The default monitor settings are okay, but the color fidelity can be improved.

Color management is necessary for print. Color management is happening in your processes, but you are not controlling it.

Yeah, but it works. I'm happy, my clients were/are happy. I work with digital images so, since they are the originals, color fidelity can't be improved as there is nothing to compare them to.

gordo

 

[dabob]

Gordo . . . it works for me too . . . like I always say . .. If it ain't broke DON'T fix it!!!!

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Attached is a top down view of a 3D gamut Plot of a 6 month old MacBook Pro 15” Retina Display.

The outer ghosted image is the default display profile shipped by Apple with this machine.

On the inner left is a profile generated by an uncut i1pro spectro.

On the inner right is a profile generated by a ColorMunki spectro (UV cut).

Although a 2D slice view of a 3D gamut is rather limited, the full 3D comparison does not lead to any surprises. Altough slightly wider in gamut in some places and narrower in others - a custom profile and the default “canned” profile are consistent in shape, if not size. This backs up Gordo’s view that the default display profile on an uncalibrated/unprofiled monitor may be “good enough” in a fully colour managed workflow. Switching between profiles, the default and the custom profile are not exactly the same colour, but they could be good enough if one is only working with press CMYK output.


Stephen Marsh

 

[dabob]

Color Management

Color Management

To expand on my previous comment of "if it ain't broke DONT fix it" I offer this . . . I have been in this business since the late 60's and if back then somebody mentioned "color management" at that time it had a whole different meaning - picture Paula Dean and her comments . . . There is in fact "color management" I do use - its knowing what my systems do and how my platesetter and pressroom will react to the files I send them. If I were not in a closed loop system with the knowledge that I have of it I would probably think that all that technology was just the cat pajamas . . . but like Matt's old co-worker who corrected in black and white channels who took the knowledge with him when the left. There is a loss of craft in all industries and more reliance on technology to fill in the gaps of knowledge that us "old folks" just absorbed over the years.

One of my favorite sayings is that . . . when, not if, the internet/grid fails we will all be looking for an encyclopedia Britannica to teach us how to make candles so we can read the books at night to learn how to make soap.

 

[michaelejahn]

You are fooling yourself Gordo !

You are fooling yourself Gordo !

The first time I see color is on the printshop supplied contract proof and then the final presswork.

It is laughable that you think you are not using color management. That sentance above says it all Gordo - your service provider is doing the color management for you ! How else does 30 cyan show up on that proof looking like 30 cyan - and then stay as 30 cyan in the presswork ? Why ? Because someone characterized and calibrated the devices so they behaved, that's why.

You are using color management

 

[gordo]

It is laughable that you think you are not using color management. That sentance above says it all Gordo - your service provider is doing the color management for you ! How else does 30 cyan show up on that proof looking like 30 cyan - and then stay as 30 cyan in the presswork ? Why ? Because someone characterized and calibrated the devices so they behaved, that's why.

You are using color management

I don't think so.

The printer may have setup their proofer and aligned their press to print to that proof - however, that's a closed system. As such it does not include me when I'm creating a file. So they are not doing the color management for me.

gordo

 

[dabob]

I don't think so.

The printer may have setup their proofer and aligned their press to print to that proof - however, that's a closed system. As such it does not include me when I'm creating a file. So they are not doing the color management for me.

gordo

What I am talking about is calibration not color management because 30years ago . . . long before "color management" collided in a phrase we were all about "calibration" it didn't deal with different monitors, output spaces, LAB, RGB, CMYK, 16 bit 8 bit . . . . it was either right or wrong and I'm still seeing customers walk in with their "color managed" files that don't give them what they expect - and then its our fault for not matching their managed color . . . IMHO "Color Management" is just inserting technology to hide where ignorance grows

 

[meddington]

IMHO "Color Management" is just inserting technology to hide where ignorance grows

Color management as its applied to a proofing platform is unquestionably positive. That an inkjet proof can match a snapshot of a printing press to a very high degree of accuracy has been proven (though caveat's such as OBA can skew this). Whether or not the printer can print to that snapshot day in day out is a different story, but doesn't discount color management. If a customers color managed file isn't representing a printer's output condition, then results can be poor.

IMO, Gordo's argument is more correctly stated as "custom profiling of my monitor isn't necessary for success in my particular workflow". Hard to argue with that. Though if you change a variable, say introducing a wide gamut monitor, the results could very quite a bit.