Color Management with Kaleidoscope

[steppy]

Hello:

As we work at our color management I am hoping to reach out to Esko Kaleidoscope users and share experiences/expectations.

Some key questions are:

What ?E are you achieving in your color strategies?

What is your target ?E?

How consistent is your ?E?

Does your ?E fluctuate more for uncoated stock?

To what do you attribute fluctuations?

How important is the ?E "number" to your overall process? If it goes high but proofs still "look good" do you worry?

How often do you check your strategy?

Hope to hear from you...yes you!

best,

stephen

 

[christod]

Re: Color Management with Kaleidoscope

We use Kaleidoscope to create profiles that we then use in our Tickets to link a 'Source' (our Kodak Approval, which itself is matched in several configurations to our flexo presses) and our 'Destination' (our EPSON 7800 and 9800 printers.) We are printing from Pilot through a GDI interface, which as I understand it does an on-the fly CMYK to RGB conversion, and then RGB to 7 colour EPCON format.

This works surprisingly well. Depending on the image we can be a 90-92% match, Epson to Kodak. Depending on the image we can be a 0% match.

We would hope that there are more tools to fine-tune the colour matching but we have not been able to get any advice from ESKO support to move this along.

Our wish would be to have a fully accurate EPSON proof to use in the various editing iterations in Photoshop. Again depending on the nature of the images the EPSON is either reasonably close, or not close at all. In consequence we need to make more Kodak Approvals than the budget would call for.

We tried 'Colour Strategies' a bit under SCOPE 3 but really got nowhere. I would be interested to hear wow you use Colour Strategies because we have not bee able to find any documentation available. Has Colour Strategies improved under Suite 7?

Regards,

Chris

 

[steppy]

Re: Color Management with Kaleidoscope

Chris:

We never used scope just suite 7 backstage so i can't say it is improved or not.

My understanding is that the color strategies combine the source and destination profiles. So your ticket specifies a strategy not the source and destination profiles. My guess is you get to the same place either way.

However, using a color strategy with Kaleidoscope lets you perform a "check strategy". We have found that the check strategy is a useful tool to watch for changes by measuring process deviation-?E, (delta E).

My original post was an attempt to get a sense of how we are doing compared to others using similar systems. Pretty dismal response eh!

best,

stephen

 

[wesley]

Re: Color Management with Kaleidoscope

What kind of screening are you using on your kodak proofs? What differences in Gamut do you find. Do you also proof with uploaded tiffs from FlexRip?
Thanks