Westin Mission Hills Resort Rancho Mirage (Palm Springs) California September 10-13, 2000	media sponsor
S p e c t r u m  2 0 0 0 - Conference Notes [ TRANSLATING TECHNOLOGY INTO NETWORKED PRODUCTION ] | Home | Personal Development Workshop | Proofing and Color Management | | Managing Generation X | It's All About the Ride | Advertising and Publishing Trends |

"What is the status of color management?" is a question Michael Rodriguez and friends gathered together to discuss at the GCA's Spectrum 2000 conference. "The reality," Rodriguez professes, "is that new color management tools, based on a lot of scientific theory, are still fairly immature. And in the high-end marketplace, these new color management tools have not been rolled out effectively. There's a disconnect that I think we have to come to grips with."

But all hope is not lost, Rodriguez assures. "We have to get to an arena of standards for color management. . Ideally, color management must serve the creative process. It must begin in the beginning of whatever media is going to be produced. Color management must also serve our production needs; it must be consistent and fit into our workflow."

Identifying a way to integrate color management into a print production workflow is essential, concurs Jeff Riman: "The tools and the science are very much with us right now, but we need to look at how these tools fit into the workflow."

Riman's suggested mission begins with the development of industry-wide standards applied to all areas of the workflow: creative, production, proofing and printing. "The effort that goes into building the foundation of a color management system is the biggest task," he explains, "but no task is too large if it provides you with consistency and predictability."

Currently, with large variances in the areas of proofing, press calibrations and digital proofing, Riman predicts that it will be a daunting task to create across-the-board standards for what defines acceptable color for the variety of forms a printed piece may take: billboards, packaging, marketing/collateral, publication and catalog. "We might need to go to a communist model: If it's good for one, it's good for all," Riman suggests.

Another hurdle that stands in the way of further color management progress has to do with the culture of print itself, Keith Rudesill remarks. Too often, color management technologies are developed with the back-end of the process in mind, when they should target the front-end, at the design stage. "We're interested in the creative process," he explains. "Those are the people who pick color and deal with the actual client. And up until now, very little attention has been paid to those people. All of the major manufacturers of software and proofing devices are aiming at the million-dollar printers."

Michael Weinglass, who hails from Easyriders, a multi-title consumer and trade publisher, professes to have a few color management issues of his own, and he suggests some simple solutions that he's employed: "We had scanner issues, primarily. . Using LinoColor software, we scan into LAB and then convert the image in Photoshop. Every week, we run digital proofs to make sure that the proofer and the scanner are synchronized. The other problem we solved, way back in 1993 when we were an early digital workflow adopter, was an issue with our monitors. We had a stable of aging monitors that were degrading slowly. . And we had what a lot of other companies have, a growing monitor graveyard. So, we went out and bought identical monitors, and that certainly helped us with consistency in house. Our printer also provides us with an updated proofing file output that we eyeball and then adjust color to. . These steps have helped us get more consistent color, but the fact remains that we're still working in an RGB space but printing CMYK. Until that changes, color management will never be easy."

Glenn Andrews agrees that color management has never been easy, but it can be achieved. At AGT, he explains, "We're actually using color management very successfully. I wouldn't describe myself as a technofanatic, and sometimes I think this computer thing has gone a little too far. Color management is there," he stresses, "but why is it being used so little? And why are the results so disappointing? "I think we can learn a lot from history," Andrews adds. "Sometimes too much talk can have unfortunate results. If there's been a single result of all this talk, all of this hype, all of this buzz [about color management], is that it has succeeded in dividing the color community into the believers and the skeptics. For the believers, [color management] was love at first sight. All of the promises were like a dream come true, and it was cool and zippy. But the skeptics are the grumpy old people in the land once known as lithography."

For color management to succeed, Andrews suggests, the Land of the Believers and the Land of the Skeptics must meet on common ground.