IMHO, and speaking this time as a one-time Art Director, I'd suggest that
anyone dealing with RGB, CMYK, Lab colors, and printers (of the
press/magazine/newspaper type), copy this post and save it to HD (and to
personal memory, as well). It's gut-written and honest, and therefore will
give you a wee bit of insight that you would not have otherwise gotten
without several years of frustration.
Best regards--LRA
>From: TonySleep@halftone.co.uk (Tony Sleep)
>Reply-To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
>To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
>Subject: Re: filmscanners: Which Buggy Software?
>Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 02:49 +0100 (BST)
>
>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
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