G7 Expert funding through WIA

[gordo]

This is mainly for Mike. As a consultant and color expert, I hope he sees it and rethinks his "opinion" on G7 for wide format. It's growing very quickly across all of print and the wide-format world. http://www.bluemedia.com/about/g7/. And by the way, no one in my class of 40 people was a color novice. Just like me, they all had various degrees of intermediate-to-expert color management in their backgrounds. Again--as in the beginning--just trying to be helpful to my peers.

I appreciate your trying to be helpful.

On a separate but related point, it appears that bluemedia, in the link you provided, has made the same leap of misunderstanding that many printers do when discussing G7. They write:

"All of our proofs and printing follow the strict G7 International Standards for consistent color and quality. Not only are our proofing machines calibrated to all of our presses and other devices, but what we proof or print here will be an exact color match to proofs or printing done anywhere in the world by other G7 Certified printers. The G7 standard is fast becoming very important to customers that are printing projects in different parts of the world to maintain uniform color."

The misunderstanding is in the claim that grey balance via G7 methodology results in uniform color across different devices, across different locations, and between proof and press.

 

[Correct Color]

Gordo,

There's also this 'misunderstanding'...

Not only are our proofing machines calibrated to all of our presses and other devices, but what we proof or print here will be an exact color match to proofs or printing done anywhere in the world by other G7 Certified printers.

As I'm sure you know, it doesn't work that way. Despite a huge misconception in large portions of the industry, you don't ever "calibrate" one device to match another device. You calibrate devices to get them to a desired state, and then you characterize them in that state. The characterization is what is almost invariably an ICC profile.

Once you have the machine calibrated to print in its most advantageous state for your purpose, and characterized in that state, you can then send it any file in any color space, and provided the colors in the file are all in the gamut of your device, and provided that your machine state and your profile are well-made and accurate, your device will print that file correctly.

If it does, and if another device does as well, then the final output from the two devices will match. But they do not match because one was "calibrated" to match the other. They will match because both are printing the file accurately.



Mike

 

[dabob]

This "expert" thread made me chuckle . . . I was just over at my neighborhood FRYs getting some ink cartridges refilled for home and I saw a big sign saying:

A+ Certified Expert Technician . . . it was all I could do to keep from asking him what qualifications "A+" had to rate them an "Expert"