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We’re here for you – 23/6
November 3, 2007

I remember when AVIS made its mark with the We’re No. 2 – We Try Harder ad campaign. It was a spectacular success. The second line of the campaign – We Try Harder – was the clincher, and it assured success for the No. 2 car rental firm. Otherwise, if they had advertised themselves as “We’re Second-Best” it wouldn't have done much good.
So, let’s talk about why so many printers and prepress houses use SWOP CMYK to make separations for sheet-fed printing on nice paper. Is it because they like to be less-than-perfect? Is it because they want their customers to know that they could do better? Is it because they installed Adobe Photoshop, and that was the default? I suspect it’s mostly the last of those possibilities, but regardless of the reason, sheet-fed printers are continually making separations for paper and press that they don’t own, and quality suffers because of their actions.

If you told your customer, “We’ll print 76 percent of the saturated colors in your photos,” the customer would find another supplier who could deliver 100 percent of the color possible on the press. But here is the cold, colorful truth, folks: the gamut of SWOP is 76% of the volume of the gamut of U.S. Sheetfed Coated. I’ll make it graphic:
 


If you begin with a large-gamut color photo, as shown on the left, and convert to CMYK using SWOP, you get the photo on the center. If you separate for U.S.Sheetfed Coated, you’ll get the image on the right. The one on the right looks slightly better because it compresses and clips fewer total colors from the original image.

To further illustrate my point, here is the difference between the two CMYK photos as converted:


This is a photo that represents what is left behind when you convert a nice image to SWOP compared to the same image converted to U.S. Sheetfed Coated. These are colors and tones that would be available to the sheet-fed press if the larger gamut color assignment were given to the image.

SWOP is a standard for web-fed offset printing on high-speed, heat-set presses with 133-line halftones. Sheet-fed offset printing can, and should be better than SWOP. The way to make it better is to use a custom ICC profile that describes the behavior of your press/paper/ink. For these examples I used U.S. Sheetfed Coated, one of the profiles that ship with the Adobe Creative Suite. This profile is generic, but it represents what a good offset press should be able to do on coated paper. Custom profiles should be better than this.

To get this process started in your plant, I suggest you consult with one of the specialists in color management who work in our industry. Firms with which I am familiar are colormanagement.com, Rods & Cones, Steve Upton’s Chromix, and David Hunter’s Pilot Marketing. These organizations work with printers to set-up color measurement and management systems, and work to develop quality control systems. A color specialist can help get a program underway that will ensure the best printing from each of your presses on each class of paper.

Customers appreciate the commitment made by the better printers to get control over color and to provide good profiles to designers that accurately represent the output possible from these companies.

By the way, I don’t have any axe to grind with SWOP, nor the printers who legitimately use the specification. SWOP is an established standard for news magazines, and for those who do this kind of printing, it is an excellent process.

My point is that sheet-fed printers can offer – and deliver – more (about 24% more).

Posted by Brian Lawler on November 3, 2007 | Comments (0)