You're right on.
Maris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Sleep" <TonySleep@halftone.co.uk>
To: <filmscanners@halftone.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2001 8:49 PM
Subject: Re: filmscanners: Which Buggy Software?
| On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 22:33:07 -0400 rafeb (rafeb@channel1.com) wrote:
|
| > Nope. Dan's approach is to go by the numbers
| > (RGB values, or L*a*b values, or CMYK values)
|
| Oh, that still. I don't see any major contribution to road safety here:
| RGB is device dependent, whether numbers or colours - if you don't set the
| numbers for the specific output device, they will be wrong. So
R127G127B127
| is mid-grey, mathematically at gamma=1, but what's the right gamma? How
| red is red? And life is too short to start defining skin tones in
different
| lighting... I don't have a clue about what output devices will be used,
or
| what some numbskull may do as a result of what they see, once the file has
| left my hands - but it's a racing certainty that monitors will be used in
| DTP systems. LAB? Well, nobody even knows what it is, certainly among Art
| Eds and Production Eds of my acquaintance - and you can't JPEG a LAB image
| anyhow AFAIK, so I can't deliver it electronically (50Mb TIFFS are not
| popular:). And as for CMYK, I can't convert to CMYK as I have no idea of
| the press/ink/paper characteristics which will be used wherever an image
| ends up. I've discussed the possibility, never had a useable answer.
|
| All/any of these could work just fine if you have anal end-to-end control
| over the entire process, eg you are self-publishing, but nobody working
for
| magazines or press has a hope in hell of doing it that way. The
information
| simply is not available, you are just one factor in a chain which involves
| lots of people, each with specialised skills and minimal overlap, and 6yr
| old Radius monitors with screen burn. It's no use asking the designer what
| flavour CMYK they want, they won't know - and even if they can ask the
| repro house, they probably won't understand the answer, and it's all
| aggravation they don't want on press day anyhow. 'Can't you just shoot it
| on E6?' is their idea of colour management.
|
| It's this chaos that ICM is supposed to provide a thread of sanity
through,
| but the final stage, repro/print, mostly hasn't caught up and it remains
an
| area of profound drain bramage IME. In the 6 years I have been doing this
| stuff, there has been infinitesimal progress there, and supplying dig
| images remains a game of Russian Roulette.
|
| Regards
|
| Tony Sleep
| - Online portfolio & exhibit; + film scanner
info
| & comparisons
|
