Profiles...and how to tie them together, in a work flow...

[Wupper]

Hi, sorry I am really new to this, so please forgive my ignorance.

I have started to work ina Repro department in a printers(gravure press). The Printers have for the last 2 years relied on a chap in the Repro who made profiles, lots of them, and unfortunatly he had no idea what to do with them.

I have Scanner profiles and Printer profiles, and monitor profiles, but no production print profiles, he didn’t know how to get one…

unfortunatly for me, I was previously employed, in a magazine, and we sent the work to a Repro house, so I never had to bother with such things.

So on to the question, I have full rain of the Repro and the Production printer, to work on a system to bring all this information together. herein lies the problem, I have read many Forums, and Colour management manuals. and I am probably more confused than ever. How do I bring all the information together.

Does it make sence for me to Scan(RGB), work on the images in Photoshop(RGB) and then Proof(CMYK) and then seperate for production(Engraving).

We do large scans, photographic, 2X3m, work in Photoshop, and then proof, for the customer, and then send to the Production Printer (all inhouse)

Should I use Device link, to convert the RGB to CMYK. As I explained earlier I’m new please don’t flame me.

I am in a unique position to work on this from start, Scanning, to the production. Off set printing, in CMYK/in-house colours.

How would I profile the Production printer, I understand I can profile our Roland and the Mimaki, easy send file to print reead in and I have a profile. But the production would be…

Any advice is truely welcome, I found Chromix and have put this forward as a purchase, just so we can see the profiles, and have some visual understanding of what it going on.

I am sorry for all the questions.

[Patrick_Herold]

I have Scanner profiles and Printer profiles, and monitor profiles, but no production print profiles, he didn’t know how to get one…

By “production print profiles” do you mean press profiles? We make press profiles here at CHROMiX.

Does it make sence for me to Scan(RGB), work on the images in Photoshop(RGB) and then Proof(CMYK) and then seperate for production(Engraving).

Yes, this is a well accepted workflow practice.

Should I use Device link, to convert the RGB to CMYK.

Device links are probably not needed in your case. DV’s are especially useful when one needs to preserve black generation information when going from one CMYK file to another.

How would I profile the Production printer, I understand I can profile our Roland and the Mimaki, easy send file to print reead in and I have a profile. But the production would be…

Any advice is truely welcome, I found Chromix and have put this forward as a purchase, just so we can see the profiles, and have some visual understanding of what it going on.

Most traditional presses tend to have a fair amount of color variation from beginning to end of run and from one side of the sheet to the other. So what we do (and what you would want to do) is have you print our press target on several dozen sheets, and perhaps a couple of different places on each sheet, when your press is stable and in good control. Send these sheets into us, and we will analyze the color shifts across the run, taking samples from beginning, middle and end. We average these measurements, and create profiles from them. The idea is to get a good representation of your press’s characteristics. Our press profiles also include different GCR levels so you can choose what works best for you.

Press profiling is a lot more involved than I can go into here.
For anyone who’s interested, our press profile “Kit” is available for free download at:
http://www.chromix.com/colorvalet/download/press/chromixcolorvaletpresskit.zip
Inside it, the “CHROMiX Press Profiling Kit.pdf” is a wealth of knowledge about how to go about profiling the “beast” that is your press.

In the future, we are expecting to have the ColorValet Client handle the making of press profiles as well as printer profiles, but that has not been implemented yet.