Color (how do I find the "name or number" associated with a color

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:

Apple's business model is to build the boxes Adobe's products run on, and not to compete either with Adobe or with Microsoft as a software publisher.

Apple and Adobe compete for the desktop. If Adobe can convince a buyer PC's are cheaper they get no Apple competition in the Film/Video space for a start. What is iWork if not a kick up the pants of M$ Office? What is your source for this claim?

Previously, Apple could not publish a brochure advertising Apple's implementation of the ICC drawing model using Apple software and presently Apple can not publish a brochure advertising Apple's implementation of the Unicode drawing model using Apple software. What you want is more competition, because more competition means better software and better support.

?!

I believe that the large part of the control of color has to be with the Commercial Printer.

They have the press, the color management software, the color profilers, one hopes the training and in the end the final printed product.

The job of the designer should be to just balance their computer and screen, an almost impossible task in most studio set-ups, and work to known reference colors to compensate for what inevitably will be approximate colors on screen. If the screen is even capable given that Apple has eliminated virtually every model suitable for prepress.

The final conversion from RGB to cmyk should be done by the printer to their known printing conditions.

The flaws in this arrangement are that printers are not forth coming with their profiles and mostly do not want to talk about it unless you absolutely commit to giving them the job. They also don't see it as their job to get you up to speed. Nor in most cases can they trust that the supplier has done everything required.

The blame game then starts, with the designer being in an invidious position between client and printer. The printer looks after No. 1, the client doesn't have a clue and we are all getting underpaid to take quite big financial risks.

The only safe place to practice color management is as I said in-house where everything is co-ordinated , everyone co-operates and can trust the rest of the chain and has a mutual interest in making it all work.

My observation still stands that of the many books I have seen on color management I have yet to see one that has been well printed, in fact they nearly all demonstrate the results I would like to avoid.

Peter

Henrik,

I read your link which is getting a bit long in the tooth now! 🙂

I think what they are saying is much what I have said previously.

I worked as a consultant setting up 2 pre-press set-ups, principally on the computers and job flow side and saw how many jobs were diverted from their original 4 color presses to sometimes 2 color presses at the last minute to keep jobs moving.

I also got to see how much seat-of-the-pants tuning was done, which made our job well nigh impossible, we never knew what they were going to do on the press. Thankfully today's presses and workflow puts an end to most of this. The degree of control and compensation for variables is much much tighter.

But that degree of control is in-house. As soon as the material comes from outside there is no saying how good the source is. Unfortunately in most cases it is not good, and garbage in equals garbage out.

None of it is helped by the lack of disclosure by Apple or even acknowledgement that there are problems. The problems span every facet of hardware, software, training, procedures, documentation, correction of errors, human nature and trust.

Peter

I've yet to do a job with a printer that is committed to an ICC tagged workflow and doing conversions to Output CMYK profile specific to their presses either at my end or at theirs. Their pre-press staff either know very little and just say use the default adobe settings, or know quite a lot and say just give us a physical sample of key colours and we'll tweak everything on the press at runtime.

Their pre-press staff either know very little and just say use the default adobe settings, or know quite a lot and say just give us a physical sample of key colours and we'll tweak everything on the press at runtime.

This thread is spinning off into several directions simultaneously.

The thread started with reference to colour specification by device colour combinations, that is, with reference to specifying CIE colours with reference to the RGB colourant combinations of an ICC MNTR Monitor profile. There are in practice two categories of ICC MNTR Monitor profiles, those that represent an idealised monitor colour space and those that represent a measured monitor colour space. The former are linearly graybalanced and the better are big enough to hold the colours one can print in high gamut processes, the latter are not linearly graybalanced and not big enough to hold the colours one can print in high gamut processes.

With regard to colour specification in the Apple Colour Picker and in the Apple Digital Colour Meter, colour specification in the former is achievable with a different source colour space per object but not with control of the rendering intent (it will default to the default for PDF which is Relative Colorimetric with Adobe's private black point compensation), and colour space specification is achievable with the current ICC MNTR Monitor profile registered in the system for the state of the colour display (which is not the same on any two systems and which is not embedded into PDF on saving to disk).

You and Peter are now changing the subject from 'RGB PCS' colour specification in general and from Apple's implementation of 'RGB PCS' colour specification to the subject of adoption of the drawing model of the International Color Consortium in prepress and print. What you want to work on is not adoption in print, but adoption in Apple which - although the drawing model of the ICC is in fact the drawing model of Apple ColorSync 2 introduced in 1994 - Apple has a confusing and complex interface and implementation of. You see, in ICC imaging and Unicode imaging it's all about interface and implementation IN THE AUTHORING APPLICATION.

If in the authoring application, before building out the application-independent archive and interchange file format, the author is unable to configure for compatible assumptions, then the principle of GIGO Garbage In Garbage Out applies. The underlying technical problem is that ICC imaging and Unicode imaging for PDF have been implemented for driver-level processes, meaning processes that pass through PostScript which simply does not support the tagged file formats of the ICC drawing model and the Unicode/TrueType drawing model.

Martin Bailey as British Standards chair of the PDF/A working group in the UK is completely correct when he stresses, "Think about archiving needs at the point of document creation – that's the point!" PDF/A and PDF/X can be coupled in one and only one portable digital document, but Apple has neither the interface nor the implementation. It is economically essential for the European Union and the United States that software publishers discontinue the chaotification of abstract archival space and that the chaotification be discussed publically to ensure that the problems are documented.


Reference which you should read:
http://www.globalgraphics.com/news/ggpress.nsf/GGRVPressReleasesPublished/7D8469 D157A183B08025703C002FC04A/$FILE/EEPIMS_FINAL.pdf

My point was, for many people, a close enough color is fine...and for most end users, all this color matching stuff is just going to scare them away.

I've done print and web for years, and while asking for a color value isn't the "proper" way to do it, most web stuff is spec'd in rgb values. If the guy doing the PSD work simply tells the person, these colors won't match perfectly, but they'll be close enough, I suspect it'll be fine. How many people hold a brochure up to a website and say "HEY, THE COLORS DON'T MATCH!"

What is your source for this claim?

In 1989, Apple and Microsoft announced a drawing model for composition and a document model for pagination that worked more along the lines of Xerox Interpress than along the lines of Adobe PostScript. The International Standards Organisation announced a parallel initiative in 1988, since published as ISO-IEC 10180 Standard Page Description Language.

Among the problems in Adobe PostScript is the structural lack of page independent processing, a fundamental feature of Interpress as of Apple's Portable Digital Document format and Adobe's Portable Document Format, and the structural lack of a separation of character codes (the referenced) from glyph codes (the rendered), a fundamental feature of the Xerox and Apple composition models.

The original agreement on cross-licencing the Adobe PostScript drawing model for composition and document model for pagination was entered into by Steven Jobs for Apple, Dr Wolfgang Kummer for Linotype, and Dr John Warnock for Adobe. You can follow the commercial conflict in the features of the New York Times and the Seybold Review on Desktop Publishing.

The commercial conflict ended with the commercial collapse of the QuickDraw Graphic Extension in 1997, announced by Colour and Imaging Product Manager Carla Ow-Chu. In 2004, Dr John Warnock noted that Adobe and Apple agree on areas that allow of competition.

/hh

Brian Peat wrote:
How many people hold a brochure up to a website and say "HEY, THE COLORS DON'T MATCH!"

And even if they do, the printer and website owner may have followed all the perfect steps in colour management, but the person complaining may have a screen that is not properly calibrated.

Magnus Lewan wrote:

Brian Peat wrote:
How many people hold a brochure up to a website and say "HEY, THE COLORS DON'T MATCH!"

And even if they do, the printer and website owner may have followed all the perfect steps in colour management, but the person complaining may have a screen that is not properly calibrated.

These days they have absolutely no excuse as virtually everyone has a $300 Spyder2Pro to ensure those **** website flesh tones are spot on.

Of course if you have one of Apple's many new glossy, high luminance monitors, good luck getting it to balance!

P.

And even if they do, the printer and website owner may have followed all the perfect steps in colour management, but the person complaining may have a screen that is not properly calibrated.

The initial idea behind sRGB in 1995 was to interchange RGB colourant values as if all digital graphic devices had the same shape and size of colour space: a Sony CRT at D65 and a specific gamma. This sort of worked, but every digital graphic device does not have the same shape and size of colour space, especially not inkjets which have colour spaces significantly larger than sRGB.

The way forward is the ICC drawing model where each digital graphic device can be configured, calibrated, and characterised to the larger colour space it is capable of, without cutting the gamut, and with control of the device independent colour matching. This drawing model is taking over step by step, but the difficulty here is that colourimetric controls need to be in the device for most users.

AppleVision and ColorSync monitors addressed this through the Default Calibrator, the Video Card Gamma Tag, and phosphor decaying tables that worked well, see Bruce Fraser who was a sceptic if ever there was one. This sort of relatively closed system is being replaced by relatively open systems based on monitors declaring their default colourimetry to the system.

Starting in around 2000, inkjets first implemented densitometry sensors and more recently colourimetry sensors alongside internal profiling packages. Presses implemented densitometry sensors and colourimetry sensors a little earlier. Heidelberg used a GretagMacbeth spectrophotomer with an optical fibre array across the sheet, Hewlett-Packard a GretagMacbeth spectrophotometer that sits on the carriage that is conveyed across the sheet. There are also problems with digital cameras at this point, because the camera manufacturers develop 'looks' the way film manufacturers developed 'looks' in the past, but the camera manufacturers have not been good at opening up their software to third party ICC processing packages that can control the correction and conversion from the proprietary processing to the open colour management system.

It takes a long, long time, partly for developers to understand and partly for users to understand.

/hh

Brian Peat wrote:
My point was, for many people, a close enough color is fine...and for most end users, all this color matching stuff is just going to scare them away.

Well I searched the thread for Ian and the only author match after OP is in Br(ian) so I guess he got what he wanted (RGB picker/hexadecimal RGB values/digital colour meter) or got scared away!

I've done print and web for years, and while asking for a color value isn't the "proper" way to do it, most web stuff is spec'd in rgb values. If the guy doing the PSD work simply tells the person, these colors won't match perfectly, but they'll be close enough, I suspect it'll be fine. How many people hold a brochure up to a website and say "HEY, THE COLORS DON'T MATCH!"

I guess I wouldn't have bothered adding those comments to this thread if it hadn't been past clients of mine who've said, these colour don't match holding the ( +insert clothing garment here+ ) to the page. Not with a web site – I don't think anybody would expect matches there, and I use RGB values all the time to exchange colours where it's good enough. I have had a client for eg. (using 5 shades of pink in their 'colour-way') ask me to match them on a digital laser-printer. Not only are these shades out of gamut for these devices (and to some extent CMYK offset) but even getting a spread of pinks (on laser print) that can be distinguished from each other can be very difficult, especially when other colours in the 'colour-way' are right next-door to pink like pinky reds, mauves and purples.

The differences between monitor to monitor are generally not as pronounced as monitor to print differences. This is one area where client-colour problems arise. I have spoken to photographers who have to put their prof. reputations on the line and tell a client "What ever you are seeing on your monitor, I'm telling you I got the colour right because I use a scientific methodology (colour managed workflow) for my adjustments and you need to print what I have provided, not make the changes you are recommending" This means they are now vouching for the whole print job on top of their own work. If you are shooting a car ad and a high end print job is going to be run and you have to tell the client that, I imagine you sincerely hopeful the printer doesn't screw something up.

Message was edited by: wideEyedPupil

Message was edited by: wideEyedPupil

Magnus Lewan wrote:
And even if they do, the printer and website owner may have followed all the perfect steps in colour management, but the person complaining may have a screen that is not properly calibrated.

Which was my initial point! Which was m...

past clients of mine who've said, these colour don't match holding the ( insert clothing garment here ) to the page

Matching a swatch is a frequently asked question, the ColorSync Users List started on this at the same time the List started. Hope the following helps you as opposed to the original poster.

Basically, if you have a printed sample then you simply measure it with a spectrophotometer using standard measurement settings, pick the ICC profile for the printing condition in whatever software (Adobe, GretagMacbeth, X-Rite), enter the CIEL a*b values and configure a colour match by configuring a rendering intent. You will now know what you get, if you can configure the same rendering intent in the pagination software (which you can't always).

If the sample is a woven cloth, then you have the problem that the surface is diffusing and that a diffusing surface will diminish saturation when you measure with the geometry of standard measurement. In this case, it is simpler to get the customer to agree to a match you create visually on the display and reproduce on the studio colour printer, because what is printed in one printing process can be colourimetrically colour managed into another printing process.

/hh