Color Management conference is ON!

The Color Management Conference put on by Printing United Alliance is full speed ahead this year. This annual (until last year) conference is going to be at La Jolla just North of San Diego - a welcome location in January after a wild winter in North America.

I am happy to be presenting a new session at the conference. Following up on the fun we had last time we met (below) - this year my session is on the Secrets of Color Management. 

January 22 - 25th, 2022

https://color.printing.org

Color Ready 2021

Printing United Alliance is offering a virtual conference coming up Jun 9th and 10th, 2021, called Color Ready!

https://www.printing.org/events/color-ready-2021

This makes for a great substitute for the annual color conference, normally in San Diego.  Instead of sitting in an actual conference hall listening to a speaker for an hour, these sessions are concisely limited to 20 minutes and feature some of the best color geeks in the business.

Steve Upton is talking on "Calibration: It's 90% of Color Management Success."

I am presenting a session on day two for "Assessing and Verifying Profiles."  Perhaps I have missed the enjoyment of presenting and interacting with color people more than I thought over the past year.  I think all of my pent-up presenting comes out in this session!  I know I made a point of making it interesting.

Here's a riddle for you… How will this old, green, electric blanket be used in my presentation to verify profiles?

https://www.printing.org/events/color-ready-2021

I Love a Color Management Mystery!

Gumshoe, private detective, crime solving...

Deductive reasoning, sleuthing, observing…

A perplexing case, a curved pipe, a deerstalker cap...

I'm putting together my session for #COLOR20 in San Diego. This year John Thornton and I are putting more fun into the topic of color management.  This conference gets better every year.  Hope to see you there!

https://color.printing.org/speaker/patrick-herold/

Secret Color Codes

Microsoft recently announced that they are in development of a new Xbox gaming console.  Those who hang on these news items scoured the daily videos prior to the announcement, to see if Microsoft gave any advanced clues.  In the videos were screen elements that looked like "R 255"  "G 86" and such.  It turns out they were leaving a clue about the internal code name for the new gaming console:  It's called "Scarlett" and the RGB values they left as a clue were: 255, 36, 0.
 How about that?!  A color enthusiast can be one step ahead of his friends when it comes to guessing code names of upcoming gaming consoles!

If you are a card-carrying color geek, you probably already know that you do not define the color scarlet merely using the RGB numbers 255, 36, 0.   RGB numbers are merely device values and don't in themselves describe a color unless they are accompanied by a printing condition or profile.   (In a similar way, the number "4" on a toaster does not by itself tell you what color toast you're going to get.)

We can certainly make an educated guess, that because Microsoft was involved in the original creation of the color space: "sRGB", that they are intending to use that color space - and in fact that does define the color scarlet, according to Wikipedia. 

However, the illustration below shows that 255, 36, 0 in the ProPhotoRGB color space for example, is a much more saturated color than 255, 36, 0 in sRGB.  It's always a good policy to define your terms!

Print Gamut Ins and Outs

The March/April edition of the SGIA Journal has published an excellent article by Steve Upton:
Print Gamut Ins and Outs

The article is chock-full of interesting bits of info about color gamuts.  Learn what can be done to increase a printer's gamut, what does not work, how different systems like xCMYK & CMYKRGB compare, and get an "insider's view" of how gamut volume calculations are made, all by the creator of ColorThink himself!

ColorThink Pro update

There is a new update to ColorThink Pro available on our download page:

https://www.chromix.com/colorthink/download

This is not a major update but brings a number of fixes & tunings that many of you have been asking about.  (Thanks for your feedback, and keep it coming!)

While we're at it, you should know that ColorThink Pro is a 32bit app on both Mac and Windows. We're working on a major (paid) upgrade that will be 64bit. In the meantime, macOS High Sierra appears to be warning users that the app is not "optimized" for their machine. Not to worry, it runs fine.

Our initial testing with Mojave (10.14) beta indicates that ColorThink Pro will run fine there as well.  See the release notes in the download to get the skinny on all that this update touches.

ColorThink to the rescue!

Tropical fish, or defective profile?

I got a call from a printer today who decided to order a custom profile from us.  He's up against a deadline and the canned profile from the paper manufacturer is giving him a lot of banding.

Always curious about bad profiles I asked him to send it to me so I could take a look.  I ran it through some of the tests we do using ColorThink Pro, including Viewing a Rendered Gamut.  (See the "tropical fish" gamut above.)   CTP showed pretty quickly strange handling of blues, and a section of outer gamut magentas were being mapped to color locations well inside the gamut!

It turns out this profile was made using Monaco Profiler, considered one of the best profiling engines of its time, and not too long ago at that.  It occurred to me that even with a good profiling engine, you never really know what you're getting when you build a profile - unless you have a means of checking it out - seeing its shape, if the measurements match the gamut, if it renders appropriately.

This was a publicly distributed profile, going out to users of this well-known brand of paper. My customer said he was using up more paper trying to deal with his "banding" issues than he used adjusting color. To tell the truth, the profile is not so terribly bad that it produces a lot of bad color. In fact, depending on the content of the image a lot of prints might come out fine. But this customer spent a tremendous amount of time and paper trying to solve this problem while running different calibrations and head alignments with Epson. He had a deadline coming up, was supposed to print 40 x 60 inch inkjet prints, and ended up overnighting a new target to us because he was running out of time.

Some people who have never heard of ColorThink (there are a few) ask me why they should get it. How is it going to improve their color tomorrow? And I don't have a good salesman answer for them.  I say something about how it does not fix things so much as it's a diagnostic tool.  That's about when their eyes glaze over and I can imagine what they're thinking - they don't need another diagnostic tool that gives them cool things to look at but has no practical value.   So this real-world example is just one of many, many examples of the practical value of ColorThink Pro. If this customer had CTP, he would have quickly uncovered the cause of the banding that would have saved them more time and money in just one use than the program cost.  When you've got a problem - that's when you need ColorThink.

Want to learn more about ColorThink?

ColorThink Pro is one of those wide-open tools that are only limited by your imagination. It is popularly known for its 3D Grapher, that lets you visualize the location of colors and profiles.  But when it comes to using the ColorThink Pro Worksheet, lots of people don't know what can be done with it.   I have posted a couple of new videos to our Tips and Tricks playlist on YouTube that can help you get started.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL064AE0D476E8CC58

Using the Worksheet to push numbers through a profile:
https://youtu.be/C5zx0d0A4xc?list=PL064AE0D476E8CC58

Using ColorThink to help in the color matching industries:
https://youtu.be/nVjzOpWlIIg?list=PL064AE0D476E8CC58

RIT's School of Media Sciences receives donation of cutting-edge print software solutions from CHROMiX and HutchColor

Monday, February 09, 2015

CHROMiX and HutchColor donate color management and press software products

Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Media Sciences (SMS) has received donations of state-of-the-art software products from two companies considered leading providers of color measurement solutions for the printing industry.

CHROMiX Inc. and HutchColor LLC have donated licenses of two software packages to SMS, widely recognized as a leader in media arts and technology in higher education.

• CHROMiX Inc. has donated ColorThink Pro 3 software for the Macintosh, which will provide SMS students the ability to take advantage of the latest in color management innovation, including International Color Consortium (ICC) profile inspection and the use of look-up tables for color data conversion.
• HutchColor and CHROMiX have donated licenses of Curve3 software, which will enable students to gain insights into the G7 press calibration methodology. G7 produces shared neutral appearance across all printing processes, independent of ICC profiles.

“These generous donations from CHROMiX and HutchColor further enhance our school’s curriculum by giving students the ability to learn new technologies that standardize color-managed print production workflows through hands-on immersive learning,” said Robert Chung, the Roger G. Fawcett Distinguished Professor in SMS. “These solutions will provide RIT students even more ways to demonstrate their technical and problem-solving skills to prospective employers upon graduation.”

“CHROMiX and HutchColor are highly respected leaders in the area of color management technologies,” added Twyla Cummings, acting administrative chair of SMS and senior associate dean of RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences. “Partnerships like these further allow SMS to pursue research interests that meet the current and future needs of our evolving industry.”

Steve Upton, president of CHROMiX, said his company is looking forward to the collaboration with RIT and the university’s students.

“We are excited about the opportunity to partner with RIT’s School of Media Sciences to educate the next generation of print media professionals with the latest color innovation from CHROMiX,” Upton said.

Don Hutcheson, HutchColor’s president, has a long relationship with RIT dating back to 1983.

“I am delighted to know this donation of Curve3 software will help RIT familiarize future industry professionals with the latest calibration methods and reference print conditions,” he said.

Also posted at these sites:

RIT website

WhatTheyThink website

Yosemite compatibility and CHROMiX apps

Apple's Yosemite version of Mac OS X (v10.10) has just been released.

We've completed some preliminary testing for ColorThink 3.0.3 and Curve 3.0.1 and both seem to be running well.

We'll be testing Maxwell and the Maxwell Client on Yosemite in the days ahead and will let you know if we find any issues.

So far, so good!

Viewing a Rendered Gamut in ColorThink

Number 3 in our series of Tips and Tricks for ColorThink shows you how to view a "rendered" gamut in ColorThink Pro. This, combined with the "proofing" gamut can give you both directions of a profile at the same time. This is a great way to analyze the quality of a printer profile.
View it at the ColorSmarts YouTube Channel

or 

At the Tips and Tricks page of the ColorWiki.

ColorThink Grapher: What does bad look like?

Number 2 in the ColorThink Tips & Tricks video series is:
What does bad look like?

People who are using the ColorThink Grapher for the first time might not have much perspective on what a gamut is supposed to look like. You might not know a bad profile if you saw it! This tip goes through a range of different problems that we have come across which the ColorThink Grapher is particularly adept at identifying. You can view this at our ColorSmarts channel on YouTube, or in the "Tips and Tricks" page of the ColorWiki.

Tips and Tricks for ColorThink

http://youtu.be/tXQUPe29YmY 
    I have just posted on our YouTube account the first of (what might be) a series of short movies detailing how to do some tip or trick in ColorThink. Most people nowadays like to see a piece of software demonstrated in action rather than having to read a manual about it. It just somehow makes something easier to understand if you can actually watch somebody walk through it. This first video demonstrates how to use ColorThink Pro to check optimum ink limiting from a measured linearization file for a RIP.

These will also be posted in the ColorWiki:
http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/ColorThink_Pro_Tips_and_Tricks_-_Videos

Linearization and Optimization

 
Check it out. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you would like to see in the future. This topic came to us because a customer filled out a "Feature Request" - wanting us to add this feature in a future version of ColorThink. I had the pleasure of showing him how he could already do this using the current version of ColorThink Pro!

John Paul Caponigro recommends ColorThink

Here's another great review of our ColorThink Pro software at John Paul Caponigro's blog:

http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/blog/?p=5082

We're finding that our customers really like hearing about how others use ColorThink.  You get some great ideas by hearing what other people do with the software.  Many people, like John Paul Caponigro find it indespensible for explaining color to others in a classroom setting or seminar.

Ron Martinsen - ColorThink Pro Review

A lot of customers tell us how much they love ColorThink, but seldom do we get a chance to share "their love" with others.

Ron Martinsen has a popular photography blog, and he did an extensive review of ColorThink Pro recently:

http://www.ronmartblog.com/2010/11/printing-series-chromix-colorthink-pro.html

When you read this, you can't help but catch his excitement. One of our main purposes in the design of ColorThink Pro was to keep the functionality open-ended rather than limited to a wizard-like interface. This way, people can go down all sorts of workflow paths & other rabbit holes and use it for many more purposes than we ever dreamed of. And in the feedback we have gotten from people, we have found that to be true. It's great to see that Ron has "got it" and is taking this program for the 'wild ride' it was made for!

Want to view Lab values in ColorThink?

A customer asked us recently:

In ColorThink, is there a way to manually enter individual Lab colors and plot them in the 2D or 3D graphs?

The answer is: Yes!

In the manual, in the section on the grapher, there is an example of a simple Lab color list you can create in seconds in any text program. You can just copy and paste this from the ColorWiki manual into your text program:

ColorWiki: ColorThink_Pro

Or copy it from here:

BEGIN_DATA_FORMAT

Lab_L Lab_a Lab_b

END_DATA_FORMAT

BEGIN_DATA

91 -2 96

44 -29 2

END_DATA

Substitute the "91 -2 96" with Lab values of your own choosing, tab to create the space between numbers, make the list as long as you like, save it as a text file, and you can drag this file into the grapher or worksheet - and your Lab colors will be displayed.

You can also create these simple Lab color lists by bringing an image into the worksheet and clicking on it with the eye dropper tool. A list is automatically populated and you can Save List As... to export a text file or open it in the Grapher.