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My favorite SWOP rant
September 26, 2007

I am always amazed by printers and prepress people who think that SWOP is a sheet-fed color standard. It confounds me.

If I were to tell a printer that they are missing about 10 percent of the fully-saturated color gamut on their sheet-fed press, they would:

a) not believe me
b) deny it’s even possible

The problem is that by using SWOP to make color separations for sheet-fed printing, that’s exactly what they are doing. SWOP is a standard for web offset printing (thus the name Specificiations for Web-Offset Publications). The SWOP standard is great for Time, Newsweek, People, and hundreds of other magazines that are actually printed on web-offset presses, but using SWOP for sheet-fed printing is absurd, especially when there are much better color settings for excellent color printing on sheet-fed machines.

SWOP is something of a holy grail for printers who print on web-fed presses with thin pulp paper, 133-line halftones (with elliptical dots!) and heat-set drying tunnels. None of those are common on sheet-fed presses. Newsweek and Time love SWOP; Sports Illustrated loves SWOP. Sheet-fed printers should not be in love with a standard that leaves a lot of color behind.

I have visited printing plants from New Delhi to New Brunswick, and in nearly every plant I ask the same question: how are you making your color separations? The answer is more often than not, “Oh, we use Photoshop’s color separations.” When pressed for detail, I learn that they start with RGB images from cameras, then choose Image>Mode>CMYK. And, when I dig a little deeper, I learn that their Photoshop settings are at the default North America Prepress 2 defaults. Among the settings in this default is the SWOP color profile for CMYK conversions.

This is inappropriate for the sheet-fed community, and it angers me that Adobe has perpetrated this default setting on the industry despite the fact that only a few hundred presses plants actually use SWOP.

I respect the SWOP committee, and the several hundred printers who have contributed to the SWOP standard and the SWOP profile. I ask all the rest of our industry to consider alternatives, specifically custom profiles that reflect the actual color capabilities of their machines, plates, inks and papers. By doing this, the maximum color gamut, and the best color quality can be achieved with their equipment. Even without a custom color profile for their press, paper, ink combination, the alternatives to SWOP are several. Adobe includes – on the same disk – U.S. Sheetfed Coated v.2, and its counterpart U.S. Sheetfed Uncoated v.2. These profiles produce richer color, significiantly more saturation in the shadows, and an overall gamut that is visibly and measurably better than SWOP.

Read all about it!
I have published an essay about this sometimes controversial subject. To download a copy, go to my web site and click on the link to the PDF file about SWOP printing.

Posted by Brian Lawler on September 26, 2007 | Comments (0)