Color Management all the more important when having supply issues

It's no secret that many in the print industry are having problems getting and maintaining stocks of substrate material. Recent surveys show that the industry expects the situation to get worse in coming months. If this hasn't happened to you yet, it probably will! When you have different substrates being pulled from irregular sources, this is a good recipe for color inconsistency and other headaches. This is fair warning to bone up on your profile building. Modern profiling systems do an excellent job of creating profiles that make the most of your print / media /ink gamut. You might be able to profile an inferior grade of paper to look similarly to your regular paper.

What even more important, a good modern profile will accurately portray your color workflow. When it comes time to make one printer look like another printer, that's when you need particularly accurate profiles to pull this off.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention as well that a system of tracking color consistency over time is a life-safer in these unsettled times. We have had Maxwell customers who have successfully kept their supplier's feet to the fire as it were, as Maxwell provided proof that the purchased paper showed a change in quality. Contact us for information about an easy and inexpensive way to start tracking your color, and get started now - before things get busy and before trouble comes.

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

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/

JVH Digital Festival coming in October

If you are in the State of Washington in early October, make plans on coming to the:

JVH Digital Festival

October 3, 2019
Bellevue Washington

The Harrington family are a top-notch dealer for large format inkjet printers in the local Seattle market.  They are generously hosting this free educational event for their customers and anyone who is interested in learning more about printing, photography and color management.  Pat Herold of CHROMiX will be one of the speakers, teaching a beginner's session on color management. 

The JVH festivals are always fun, worthwhile events - packed with practical information for the small photography or printing business.   If you are in Washington, you don't want to miss this!

You can even enter your printed artwork or photography in the print contest.

The event is free, but please contact them to register ahead of time. 

http://www.jvhtech.com/festival.php

G7: How a big company does it

Our friend Jeff Collins,
and another friend, Mike Todryk, of IWCO Direct have a great discussion on how Mike was able to take a company with an enormous variety of printing devices & technologies, and transform it so that they know where their color is, they have their color under control, and they maintain a "shared neutral appearance" - through the wonder of G7.  Mike shares details about the software they used, and what they did to improve procedures for saving time, money and hitting industry standard color.   A special bonus near the end includes the mistakes that brand owners commonly make when communicate color to printers.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/episodes/iwco-direct-the-benchmark-of-a-process-control-culture

24. IWCO Direct: The Benchmark of a Process Control Culture Mike Todryk elegantly walks through what anyone would describe as THE absolute benchmark process control company - across (3) facilities, (13) Continuous Web Litho Presses, (10) Continuous Web Inkjet Presses, (10) Flexo Presses, (3) Digital EP Presses, (2) Sheetfed Offset Presses, (3) Contract Proofers - maintained by (4) in-house G7® Experts.

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!

Better transmissive profiles

A few years ago I posted here about the popularity of our transmissive profiles.
http://blog.chromix.com/2010/07/transmissive-profiles.html
Now, these profiles are faster, better and less expensive.  Since that post in 2010 we have invested in a state-of-the-art Barbieri LFP spectrophotometer, which makes it possible to take transmissive measurements using our standard target. 

The word "transmissive" means we are capturing the measurements of the color as it passes through the clear or semi-opaque material.  The effect of a light source transmitting through the semi-clear media and through the ink can best be captured using a spectrophotometer that is specially made for this purpose.  You might use transmissive profiles if you are producing images intended to be back-lit in light boxes or other such displays.

Before, we would have to charge $150 per profile for RGB Transmissive profiles because of the great deal of handling involved in making these measurements using the DTP-41T.  Now, we use the same target we use for the ColorValet Pro service.  This means that ColorValet Pro customers can now get transmissive profiles for only $49 more per profile.  And for our regular ColorValet customers, we have been able to lower our price for standalone RGB transmissive profiles to $99.00.    (CMYK transmissive profiles are still $150.)

https://www.chromix.com/colorgear/shop/productdetail.cxsa?toolid=50191

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.

EFI and Curve3

Curve3 recently made it into EFI’s official Knowledge Base (their online help resource) with a procedure for G7 calibrations for the Fiery proServer and Fiery XF systems. 

The procedure is a straight-forward "How-To" guide with step-by-step instructions and many good screen illustrations.  CHROMiX and HutchColor both worked with EFI to make this happen. 

EFI’s Knowledge Base link:
G7_and_Curve3_in_Fiery_XF_How-To_Guide.pdf

Check your instruments

The beginning of a new year is a great time to take stock of all your measurement devices.  I'm thinking that peak time around your company is winding down now, and you have a bit of time to devote to some proactive maintenance.

This is a good time to:

•  Run your spectros through any diagnostic programs that are available for your devices.  Barbieri has a software tool called "Service Report" for all of their instruments and X-Rite has a utility called "i1Diagnostics" that has been recently updated to work with the i1Pro 2 and IO 2 table.

The reason why you want to run your instruments through these tools when there is nothing wrong with them, is so you can have a record of what your instrument looks like when everything is good.  Run your instrument through the diagnostic tool, save the result and keep it for the future.  Someday you'll thank me when you have a color problem and the idea goes through your mind, "I wonder if the instrument is bad?"  You can run the process again and hopefully say, "Well the service report shows basically the same numbers it did when we ran the same test back in January."

• An even better way to have assurance of instrument accuracy is to measure a control tool on a regular basis.  This control tool would be a control strip that is specially made to be stable and colorfast for a long time.   We sell the Vogelsong COLORef and also bundle it with our MeasureWatch service of Maxwell.  This combination gives you a quality control strip as well as an easy way to track the accuracy of your device as you make routine instrument checks over time.  The idea is that if an instrument is going out of spec. you'll know about it ahead of time. 

CHROMiX on NEC Google+ hangout

Hey everyone… I just spent an hour discussing color management on the NEC Google+ hangout panel. It was a live discussion and a YouTube video recording is available at NEC Google+ hangout discussion. Check it out!

Curve2 Tips

In our ColorForums, I have posted a couple of responses to some frequently asked questions about our Curve2 software.

The first post discuses how the spider graph in the software relates to the control points.
http://www.colorforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=1780

Today's post describes what to do with the Run-to-run tab that shows up when you have more than one run.
http://www.colorforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=5333#5333

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!

Munki confusion

Since X-Rite has come out with a new model of colorimeter for calibrating monitors, I just know this is going to confuse people, so I thought I'd explain things. Internally, X-Rite refers to the device as the "i1D3" to reflect how it is intended to replace the i1 Display 2. But this single device comes in two different models:

1. - i1 Display Pro
2. - ColorMunki Display

The i1Display Pro is nothing like the "i1 Pro" - and -

The ColorMunki Display is nothing like the "ColorMunki"

The i1Pro instrument is a well-known spectrophotometer, and can be used to make printer profiles as well as monitor profiles. Let's try not to talk about the "i1 Pro" when we really mean the i1 Display Pro.

Also, the ColorMunki display is an entirely different device from what most people refer to as a ColorMunki device - which is a low-end spectrophotometer for calibrating displays and printers.

The i1Display Pro and the ColorMunki Display are identical in form, but the basic difference is that the i1Display Pro is faster and more expensive, and the ColorMunki Display is slower and costs less. http://blog.chromix.com/2011/06/x-rites-i1display-pro-colormunki.html

Lion bites ICC profiles

With the release of Apple's new OS X Lion operating system (10.7), there is a new twist that affects those who use ICC profiles. If you have trouble finding your ICC profiles, it is because the users' Library folder is hidden in the new OS. On the Mac, most ICC profiles are stored in ColorSync/Profiles folders, either in the username/Library/ColorSync/profiles, or the HD/Library/ColorSync/Profiles folders. Any software that relies on being able to access and write to the user's folder is going to have trouble with Lion. For example, several monitor calibration applications are able to save any monitor profile they make, but then will not accurately reflect the new profile as being in place as the system profile. Most of these vendors are scrambling to get a new version of their software out to take care of this situation. In the meantime, you can generally get into the settings area of your app and tell it to save your profiles elsewhere - in the HD/Library... location for example.

To access the user's Profiles folders directly under Lion, hold down the alt/option button on the keyboard while you navigate to Go in the main Finder menu. This will make the username/Library folder visible.

Can speakers ruin a monitor?

If you have speakers sitting on your desktop, next to your computer screen, can they damage your monitor or affect its color?

The thought is that audio speakers have magnets in them, and these magnets if they are too big or unshielded can have an immediate effect on the color of a monitor that uses magnetic fields. Colors and shapes will be bent into strange patterns near the location of the magnet. Sounds scary, doesn't it?!

While there is a measure of truth to this rumor, here are a few points to keep in mind:

• This problem only effects CRT displays, not the modern LCD which uses a completely different technology.
• This only happens when the speaker has a big enough magnet and is close enough to effect the CRT.
• You can tell immediately if this distortion is taking place, and remove the speaker from the proximity of the display.
• If you notice any lasting effects of this magnetic interference, you can run your CRT through its "de-gaussing" routine, and it should come back to normal (newer CRTs run a degauss every time they are turned on.)
  

Monitor reviews NEC PA241W & PA271W

I have just completed extensive reviews of two new displays from NEC: the PA241W and PA271W. Link to these reviews here:
PA241W review
PA271W review

While there are many places to get monitor reviews on the internet, these are mainly aimed toward the "gaming" crowd. At CHROMiX, most of our customers are professional & semi-professional photographers and other high end color specialists with a unique set of requirements for displays. Our reviews include:

• analysis of size and shape of color gamut,
• how consistent the color is across the screen,
• calibration options,
• analysis of the display when calibrated to the requirements of a photographer (which is usually much lower in brightness than other purposes.)

We write up reviews which are intended to answer the questions our customers will have, so I hope you will find them useful. Browse the ColorWiki for other reviews as well. We have articles that range from products to technology to techniques, and we add more whenever we come across something new. Look for the "Tools" section.

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.