Our Color Management System

Color management is a funny thing. If it's done right, as a client of ours, you really never know it is there. You just see big beautiful prints with the rich accurate colors they are supposed to have. Behind that great print, our color management workflow helps us achieve improved color accuracy, especially cross-media color matching between two or more imaging devices. It also helps us keep our costs down by minimizing wasted materials that are tossed out due to inaccurate color.

A large part of color management is the characterization of imaging devices and media, also called profile creation. Profile creation requires the use of special color profile software, and a color measurement instrument called a spectrophotometer. Color management can be a very sophisticated and time-consuming process. Distilling it way down, color management refers to the process of enabling equipment such as monitors, scanners, printers, etc to interpret different color spaces allowing for  accurate color in the final output. Each device "sees" or "speaks" color differently. By measuring a known color with a color-reading device such as a Spectrophotometer then feeding that information into a color management application like GretagMacbeth ProfileMaker you can profile each device. The software builds profiles that allow each device to communicate color in a standardized way.  

Printers: We create custom profiles for every paper/ink combination for every printer. These profiles let a color managed application like Photoshop or a RIP make the right conversions so that when the image needs royal blue they know just what RGB numbers they need to feed the printer to get it.

Monitors: Our primary proofing monitor is a Sony Artisan which is the gold standard for color matching. It comes with integrated color calibration capabilities that always display dead-on color.

Many digital printmakers use generic profiles that can produce results ranging from excellent to inconsistent. Sometimes the results are not as good as they could be because the profile was created with inferior hardware or software. Often the results they produce are not extensively tested to ensure quality. The answer for the best digital printmakers is to create custom profiles in-house. This lets us deal with every variable in our workflow and test new papers and inks as they come along. You absolutely want to work with a printmaker that understands and maintains a color-managed workflow.