Maxwell Certified Technician Program

New program strengthens field support for leading color system. Certified Maxwell Technicians are now empowered to implement Maxwell in digital press, wide format inkjet and other print markets.

SEATTLE, WA -- February 18, 2015 - CHROMiX, the industry leading cloud-based verification service for the graphic arts, in response to industry demand has created a new Technician Certification for Maxwell. Created over 7 years ago, Maxwell is regarded the first cloud-based verification service for printers. With now over 140 million measurements and growing, additional technical resources are needed for the growing customer base.

The Maxwell Certified Technician program provides ongoing training and support to field-level Maxwell technicians and installers, which is vital as Maxwell features continue to expand. With certification, professionals receive several benefits including their own Maxwell accounts (including MeasureWatch for their own instruments accuracy tracking), tier 3 Maxwell support from CHROMiX, and partnering opportunities. Maxwell Certified Technicians will also be listed on the CHROMiX website as a certified resource.

The following 10 professionals have demonstrated their competency by meeting criteria requirements as Maxwell Certified Technicians:

Dan Reid - RPImaging

Greg Irving - Prepress Consultants

Earl McGhee - McGhee Consulting

Lee Nelson - Full Gamut Consulting

Michael Neumann - Neugamut Consulting

Terry Wyse - Wyse Consulting

Thomas Holm - Pixl Aps

Eric Magnusson - Left Dakota

Dan Gillespie - CMG

Jim Memije - ColorHQ

With the Maxwell Certified Technician program, CHROMiX shows its commitment to supporting these professionals and advancing their Maxwell skills as they support the growing list of Maxwell customers. 

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. 

Looking forward to Color Conference in December!

December 6th - 9th, 2014 - The 2014 Color Conference presented by the Printing Industries of America, the conference will be at the Hilton Scottsdale Resort and Villas, Scottsdale, AZ and is always a favorite stop for CHROMiX to end the year colorfully. Please come on by our booth and say hello to Rick, or attend one of Steve's or Pat's sessions. We'll look forward to seeing you there!

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!

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!

Black and white display

Maybe this seems rather regressive, but in a day and age when people are using their phones to send text messages, this could be the next Big Thing.

Did you know you can calibrate an Eizo to produce a perfectly black and white display? I didn't. A recent post in ColorForums got me doing some research in this vein.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  One is to create an RGB profile in Photoshop but define the primary colors using very low-chroma primary colors.  Eizo's ColorNavigator software can be called in to emulate that profile on their display and you end up with a mostly black and white display.  An even better way to get a more completely neutral result is to go into the ColorNavigator advanced feature that allows you to independently adjust contrast, saturation and such on 6 colors.   I removed all saturation, re-calibrated, and now have a perfectly calibrated black and white display.   (I wonder if I can get 'I love Lucy' on this...?)

Dye Sub printer profiling

I recently got back from two days of training on the new Epson F-series dye sub printers.  It's amazing how many ways there are to get the color wrong in this process.  When it comes to making profiles for a process that transfers color to fabric like T-shirts, you have to get right:

- the settings in the RIP

- the printing to transfer paper

- the procedure of using the heat press to transfer the image onto the fabric.

Don't get me wrong - these new Epson printers are amazing and I've never seen such brilliant images from a dye sub process.   The amount of color you can transfer onto a piece of fabric these days is just stunning.  It's almost like looking at a fine art print.

This training was in partnership with JVH Technical here in the Northwest.  This is a great Epson dealership, well known for outstanding customer service.