Handling customers files...

[kdw75]

We are a tiny print shop that has gotten by since the days of letterpress printing without much if any color calibration process implemented. Our customers have been satisfied and it didn't seem necessary. We of course made sure that our film imagesetter and platesetter were putting out the correct screen percentages and we have calibrated our monitors, but other than that we just blindly ignored calibration.

On the digital side of things I have been doing my best to learn and recently started watching Lynda.com videos, though I am part way through them, I still have lots to learn. We currently have our digital machines calibrated, and our papers profiled, with our ES2000 and seem to have very good results.

What I still don't understand though is how to handle it when you aren't the creator of the file and it may have multiple objects in multiple colors spaces with incorrect profiles attached to some objects. From my limited understanding if the customer attached a profile that is incorrect that will mess up the colors, and if they don't include a profile for the scanner that they used how do you get accurate color? Some barely know what a font is so asking them about color profiles is not really an option.

Is it best to strip off all profiles?

 

[Stephen Marsh]

I think that there are generally three approaches:

1. Honour all profiles from the customer where they are provided. It is not your concern whether the profiles are “correct” or not, they are what they are. When they are not provided, you will have to assign/assume a given RGB and or CMYK profile as the source/incoming description of colour data. Just as you should not care whether the customer really wishes to use Arial or Helvetica, you don’t just decide to swap out their Arial fonts and replace them with Helvetica…same idea with colour profiles. All the honoured RGB and CMYK input profiles would be transformed into your final target simulation and print space.

2. Ignore/Reject all incoming profiles, assign/assume a standard RGB and CMYK definition of the incoming colour. All the assumed/assigned RGB and CMYK input profiles would be transformed into your final target simulation and print space. Not the method that I would personally endorse, although it is used by more than one site!

3. Hybrid approach combining the first two options - honour any RGB profile as input, ignore any CMYK profile as input and assign/assume the local reference print condition to the CMYK values in the file (i.e. If you print to GRACoL C1, then ignore any SWOP profiles and assume that the numbers are in your final press or simulation/target space). This is perhaps the “most common” method of working.

P.S. What specific software are you talking about, as they are all slightly different, however the overview should be the same/similar.


Stephen Marsh