A Nice Colour Project to Close the Week

OK Gary I give in – so here you go; at last I am pleased and honoured to add to the Tunicca Blog. Now, this is my first time – yes I am a virgin blogger – so please be gentle with me! My first challenge of course is to select a subject to write about and to try to construct a nice little blog that informs and has as few spelling mostakes as possible (darn, that’s a bad start).

So, just a little bit about my day yesterday. I visited a rather large Pre-media organisation in London to start the first day of a large colour quality program for them. First of all; North to South London on a warm sunny day – well I have to say that I’ve had more comfortable long haul, economy class flights to Sydney! But I will save my rant about London’s sweaty train and underground system for another time.

Regarding the project initiation; a most enjoyable experience as we began the construction of a framework of a system to audit, monitor and ultimately improve the level of colour quality being supplied by this particular organisation’s numerous and diverse print suppliers. This is all based around our good friend ISO 12647-2 and the idea is to use this standard as a benchmark and tool to aid the printers in ensuring an ongoing improvement of colour reproduction.

But four colour process work is just the start, as we will also aim to help them produce guidelines for the reproduction of brand colours for the numerous blue chip customers that utilise the expertise of this fine company.

That’s all I can tell you I’m afraid ladies and gentlemen as discretion is my middle name. Just good to be involved in a project that will reach out to many printers and make such a massive difference for our customer and their customers. Just a shame that the day was tainted by the sweaty, overcrowded, multi legged, protracted and inevitably late train journey!

Anyway, how was that for a first blog? I rather enjoyed that – more to follow.

Author: Sean Runchman    

Colour Processing – Where is it going?

So we’re all familiar with the old problem of managing colour, well we should be so many people talk about it and claim to be experts (I only know two people that really do live and breathe it) well it looks something like this:

Where you have little control over the input channels as you have no idea who created them, whether the profiles attached are real or not, what process they have been seperated for and even if they have been provided to anyone as some sort of colour expectation…. So we attempt through our workflows to standardise to a set standard and reprocess the colour of the desired output channels.

Seems ok I guess? It’s been working for however long, but what is the future?
We know that our biggest problem is not the technology, even though technology is improving year on year with companies claiming to have developed the ultimate tool only to release something even better the following year, so software technology, workflow and hardware is the least of our problems. It boils down again to the human factor, how do we eductate people in subjects that they are not interested in, how do we get them to follow very very simple proceedures that we set out for them, how do we get them to beleive that we know what we are doing and that they need to follow we have laid down in those proceedures…. Why is the human factor such a problem!

Are we able to change the rules and rather than make it simple for the users to get wrong, we make it extremely hard and let them follow the path of least resistance and get it right? Sounds an outrageous idea, but we have tried easy, people seem to think we are insulting their intelligence with easy, so lets make it hard and get them to think for the money we pay them.

Or do we place even more colour processor workflows in and allow for a completely automated colour transformation where the final output is not the same as the viewed colour on the screens? Myself I think we will automate more to de-skill the workforce a little more in order to gain control over our colour expectations.

Author: Gary George