For what it's worth?
For what it's worth?
Nicely written Mike!
It seems to me that what's underlying most of our differences of opinion with regard to color management practices and policies. Is that our own individual perspective's and experience's influence the standpoints that we often reflect in our posts.
In other words, specific practices that work well for, lets say a National Geographic Magazine type publication, often do not work well for, or apply to the shop who's specialty is direct-mailers printed on un-coated stocks.
Perhaps another way of saying this is that when we share our experience's with the forum but omit the context of where we acquired our experiences, it is not likely to be as beneficial to others as it could be if we hadn't omitted these contexts?
Just a sentence or two like, "I work in a High-end sheet-fed offset print shop and have frequent customer press-checks" or " I Work at a cold-set, web offset 4/C daily newspaper", etc etc. Should suffice.
I believe that Mike's post sticks with the fundamentals and framework of color management and therefore should be common to all of our experiences.
I think that perhaps the word
"translation" might be a bit more informative than
"equivalency" in the quote below snipped from Mike's post? Maybe not?
"Color management works like this: The output of every digital color device gets measured--not just its RGB or CMYK primaries, but hundreds or thousands of color combinations, and a kind of translation table is built that gives equivalency between the "device color," which is RGB or CMYK and the PCS, usually in L*a*b* units. This table says, "When this device is given so many units of R, G, and B, or C, M, Y, and K, it produces a color that looks like THIS." Or, when I feed the device a color that LOOKS like THIS it produces THESE RGB or CMYK numbers.
To use the analogy of
translating between two different languages to further emphasize the boundaries we sometimes encounter between Color spaces.
So as an example, lets say that one language(LAB) has a vastly larger vocabulary than the language that we want to translate it into? And lets say that the language with the larger vocabulary contains the word "trogans" and it means essentially "my eyeballs are swollen and that my hair hurts in the morning",when translated into English okay?.
But the language that we really intend to translate the word "trogans" into, has only 400 words in it's lexicon(CMYK) and that it's lexicon is simply a collection of grunts, groans, quips and moans manufactured by Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone during their most notable movie appearances
So what I'm trying to say is that, omitting the context and scope of the translation that defines our expectations and provides us with a reasonable yardstick with which to measure our results by, is required before we can intelligently discuss anything outside the scope of theory here.
Color management provides the best possible equivalencies admirably for the migrations between color spaces when properly informed, no doubt and no argument from me!
But if our clients are expecting to see the same gorgeous scarlet and crimson Sunset that they photographed at the beach the other night on Kodachrome film, to be matched by our 4/C web offset press running newsprint stock. Then we have failed to set the proper expectations for our customer.
Color management, be it digital or analog, be it well informed or not, has never been able to make a device with a feeble dynamic range match a device with a far superior dynamic range.
Best Regards
OT
