Saturday, May 20, 2006
Color Management at On Demand
At On Demand earlier this week there were surprisingly no color management system vendors (or vendors that have a solution were not marketing it). When automating a workflow, managing color is a very important step.
I talked to a few expo attendees about the problems they face in their digital printing operation and they all mentioned color as a sore spot in there workflow, especially if they are using a Web-to-print production system.
Web-to-Print is no longer a buzzword, but a reliable method in which printed products can be efficiently ordered and produced. However, there are some color management issues that need to be over come to make a these system produce desirable color.
In many web-to-print scenarios the print requester (the print buyer) rarely sees a hardcopy proof of the product that is being ordered. They must rely on what they are seeing on their screen. - Think of all the uncalibrated and profileless display out there.
In these same scenarios it can be safely assumed that proper color management techniques such as tagging or apply source profiles, are not followed. The only tagging of source profiles occurs when it is automatically done. E.g A digital camera applying a sRGB profile to an image.
I don't think there is an easy solution to the color management issues in Web-to-print production systems. However, I think there needs to be more discussion between digital printers and color management system vendors.
Posted in: ON DEMAND 2006
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