To shed some knowledge on this, Sign Builder Illustrated connected with Jeff Burton, the digital printing analyst at the Specialty Graphic Imaging Association (SGIA). Since 1998, Burton has been consulting on digital imaging production, computer, and workflow issues, as well as digital equipment/vendor recommendations. He has also developed webinars and classroom curriculum in color management.
2 comments:
I've actually had a really similar experience to this recently. I worked this summer on designing a t-shirt for my fraternity's Labor Day BBQ. I spent most of the summer working on Illustrator and using the colors provided by the t-shirt manufacturer in order to save on production costs. Once finished, I discovered that I had to also make a poster, but I had just sent my laptop in for repair along with the files for the shirt. I ended up having to use a combination of photoshop and illustrator to work on the design and deconstruct it and expand for poster printing (since the print was much smaller). Once the posters were printed, I noticed that 1) The color matching tool in adobe is not spot on and will sometimes "round" to the closest color and 2) the color matching of the printer and the shirt were slightly off. This wasn't such a huge deal for my use, but it was definitely something good to notice for future applications.
I was hoping that this article would be a bit more relevant to me, but at least some of the stuff was good to know. I've had lots of issues with printers and color profiles, and at some point I'm hoping to have the time to calibrate my printer to my computer, but I don't think that's gonna be a thing until after Hawk vs. Handsaw is over. One of the best printing experiences I had was at a small, local print shop/gallery when I needed to prepare prints for a photography gallery. The owner had me look at all of the images with him on a giant apple monitor that was perfectly calibrated to the large format printer next to him. I was so pleased with how everything turned out, so hopefully at some point I'll be able to have that sort of setup with my small desktop printer. I've printed stuff for Susan's class at Costco, and although that was significantly cheaper, the difference in quality was huge. It wasn't that the prints were bad, and they were actually pretty good, but the other prints were just so phenomenal.
I've also seen major color calibration issues in book printing. In addition to CMYK, there's a fifth color called the bleed color that is the main color on the cover. For the first printing of a book it's carefully selected, but in subsequent printings that color is just sampled off the last batch. It's not an issue until you get to 8 reprints later and theres a drastic difference in colors.
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