We Saw True Color Management

Color management was a hot topic at Graph Expo. But aren't we always promised color management? Nevertheless, since the advent of the digital front end there has been near chaos: too many ways of preparing the file by creatives, too many page setup schemes in prepress, too many ways to rip files to plate, too many proofing concepts, too many variables on press. Yet this year at Graph Expo, we may have seen the beginning of the end of this chaos.

I won't pretend to report comprehensively all the vendor offerings, but offer instead a sense of the methodologies proposed by a few, the logic behind them and, by extrapolation, a sense of where we are going.

The first trick is to manipulate files in RGB space from creation to output device. Because the light-emitting technologies used in monitors present the largest color gamut spaces, doing all the creation, editing and proofing in the RGB world preserves this large color gamut throughout the prepress process. The final conversion to the CMYK print truncates those gamuts.

Today's computer power enables accurate transforms into CMYK, without color errors creeping in. Vendors now provide controls for on-screen color—an example is ICS' Remote Director—guaranteeing that color meets ICC profile specifications on the screen. Artworks' Nexus Workflow guarantees color conversions from one color space, say an Adobe RGB, to SWOP—simulating the actual, narrower SWOP color space on a color monitor. In a particularly compelling demonstration of color consistency across several output media, Kodak Polychrome Graphics (which also supports Artworks) showed color consistency in Matchprint Virtual press-side monitor proofs, its 5034 DI Press prints and NexPress digital prints.

In another vein, consistent color management requires that print output be repeatable, as well. Ink supplier Flint Ink promises that every batch of its ArrowStar ink pigments will be the same today, tomorrow and next year. And Creo—with its Spotless concept of extended colorsets combined with Staccato stochastic screening—promises better color consistency on the printed sheet, aided by stochastics' inherently wider color latitude on press.

Thus, at Graph Expo we saw color-managed files move from device to device with consistent results, adroitly simulating what a given color will look like from one step to the next. You can, at last, really see what your SWOP-printed sheet will look like on your monitor proofing screen. And the customer can make changes (for example, on the monitor proof) and know that the results will exactly follow his or her desires.

The only issue, then, is whether these new systems are durable and affordable. If the recent history in CTP is any guide, we'll again see that with better technology, competition drives prices down and quality up. We will look back on Graph Expo 2004 as the time when true color management came to the printing industry.