Question #1, is it possible to make color management work strictly from within prepress? If the pressman isn't on board and doing their part such as monitoring dot gains and trying to keep them within a certain tolerance, for example, +\-4%, will color management using G7, profiles, curves, work at all or very well? If dot gains aren't monitored, only densities, would it be better to just forget curves and go linear? My thoughts have led me to think that wrong, bad, or outdated curves may be worse than linear or no curves at all?
Question #2: During production runs, all I read suggests something on the order of +\-10 density points as a tolerance. Is this what most go by, something higher or lower, or nothing at all? Do you have an established tolerance and if it drifts out of that do you save the sheets? All honest answers appreciated. Just trying to determine if we are being too strict with our expectations. Recently experienced 10 press runs first hand by helping out there and on these short runs of 2800 plus 1000 sheets startup each run, I'd say only 10% would have probably met a +\-10 tolerance, saw some that were +40 to -20 in black, on the same sheet even, what I saw was that it took that many sheets for it to get leveled out and approaching being within that tolerance. This is the same thing I've experienced when pulling targets for curves, it would take two to three thousand sheets for them to get one or two P2P targets into a +\-5 density range. We do not have presets or closed loop color, is this what we should expect on a 19x25 short run 4-color job on a mid-1990's Heidelberg? I realize we are only trying to minimize the amount of variation at best and trying to determine if we have unrealistic expectations? We are an in-plant, so printing for ourselves, what would be your maximum tolerances for density variation before you'd be afraid of your customer noticing and you having to reprint or give credits? I realize it depends on the colors you're laying down to a certain extent so do you go by how close it's matching the proof, like some colors can vary a lot and still look pretty good compared to the proof but sometimes certain colors can be within tolerance and look different than the proof still. Do you follow a hard and fast rule of tolerance or is it left up to the pressman's judgement?
Question #2: During production runs, all I read suggests something on the order of +\-10 density points as a tolerance. Is this what most go by, something higher or lower, or nothing at all? Do you have an established tolerance and if it drifts out of that do you save the sheets? All honest answers appreciated. Just trying to determine if we are being too strict with our expectations. Recently experienced 10 press runs first hand by helping out there and on these short runs of 2800 plus 1000 sheets startup each run, I'd say only 10% would have probably met a +\-10 tolerance, saw some that were +40 to -20 in black, on the same sheet even, what I saw was that it took that many sheets for it to get leveled out and approaching being within that tolerance. This is the same thing I've experienced when pulling targets for curves, it would take two to three thousand sheets for them to get one or two P2P targets into a +\-5 density range. We do not have presets or closed loop color, is this what we should expect on a 19x25 short run 4-color job on a mid-1990's Heidelberg? I realize we are only trying to minimize the amount of variation at best and trying to determine if we have unrealistic expectations? We are an in-plant, so printing for ourselves, what would be your maximum tolerances for density variation before you'd be afraid of your customer noticing and you having to reprint or give credits? I realize it depends on the colors you're laying down to a certain extent so do you go by how close it's matching the proof, like some colors can vary a lot and still look pretty good compared to the proof but sometimes certain colors can be within tolerance and look different than the proof still. Do you follow a hard and fast rule of tolerance or is it left up to the pressman's judgement?