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Color
Management
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Recommendations:
- Buy the
best monitor you can afford. Color is your business, after
all. A good monitor will be capable of displaying good color, and
it will have the RGB and other built-in controls you need to
calibrate it properly. It will also stay in calibration longer. It
doesn’t do you much good to calibrate your monitor if it quickly
goes out of tune. A good monitor can save you money in the long
run because you will not need as many proofing cycles to get the
color right.
- Control
the viewing environment around your monitor. Ideally you would
bring the entire room into conformance with an agreed upon
specification. But at least eliminate the obvious causes of
variation-close the blinds, don’t use a dimmer switch on the
lights.
- Use a
viewing booth. Buy a 5000K variable intensity desktop viewing
booth for viewing proofs and set it up adjacent to your
monitor.
- Calibrate
your monitor regularly. You can use Apple ColorSync or Adobe
Gamma.
- Most
importantly, choose a printer who can give you a proof that
matches exactly what will be produced on press. This is not as
easy as it sounds. You can’t just ask your printer. All printers
sell contract proofs, and all printers will tell you that they
will match their proof on press - it is after all a “contract”
proof. But unless the printer has gone through a rigorous process
to tune the press and proofing device, it will be impossible to
match on press certain colors that the proofing device
produces.
- Become
familiar with the differences between your monitor and your
printer’s output. One way to do this is to carefully compare
the file you sent to a printer as displayed on your monitor with
the printed product (and the proof) that the printer produced.
Even better, compare a special “test image” as displayed on your
monitor with the same image as output by your printer. When
working with Courier, use the image on the inside back cover of
this book, and compare it with the corresponding file that you can
download by clicking
here.
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