Recently, we have been receiving more and more colour management consulting enquiries where “digital first” designs reach their limits: Namely, always when, after a few months or years, the first trade fair appearance, the first annual report or the first catalogue in classic online printing is due. And it is precisely at this moment that it occurs to everyone involved that they do not even know how their “digital first” colour strategy is supposed to look in print. But let’s take a look at the problem from the beginning:
sRGB
Gamut map: The colour tool for cross-media design
Due to our involvement with freeColour e.V., at the last meeting in Switzerland the desire for a cross-media tool for designers was expressed with which one can create intersections of colourspaces from the freieFarbe CIELAB HLC Colour Atlas XL. With Gamutmap, Proof GmbH has now created such a tool, which is available to all designers free of charge. With Gamutmap nearly 100 individual colour spaces can be indicated from 34.250 colours of the entire CIELAB colour space, or intersections from many combined colour spaces can be indicated. An example: As …
Why is the embedding of RGB profiles so important?
A few days ago we received a call from a customer in the field of design, who sent open Adobe InDesign data in ISOCoatedV2 300% with contained RGB images to the production company for a complex CD production on the advice of the producing company (“The printing company still has a prepress stage, which can then prepare your data optimally…”). The result of the finished printed CD booklets and inlays did not correspond at all to the calibrated monitor image of our customer, the client was also unhappy and requested …
Which RGB working colour space is suitable for colour-consistent work?
In the early days of color spaces Apple and e.g. Photoshop up to version 5.5 set the monitor color space as working color space by default. But it soon became clear that a design office would be working with 10 Macs in 10 different color spaces. A neutral concept was needed. There are many RGB Colour Spaces around. In the area of print media there are currently primarily three different variants: sRGB, AdobeRGB(1998) and eciRGB_V2. The sRGB color space is widely used in digital cameras and is the industry leader …
Embed profiles for proofing? Yes or No?
The question often arises whether color profiles should be embedded in the PDF files for proofing. To answer the question, you have to get some answers: The proof should simulate the subsequent offset printing. For offset printing, with few exceptions, the imagesetters have been configured so that a 70% black in the file is displayed as 70% black on the printing plate, no matter what profile was specified in the file. It didn’t matter whether it was coated paper or uncoated paper: 70% in the file corresponded to 70% on …