“One of the biggest challenges most of these people are faced with when it comes to color management is consistency across printers and consistency across the prints,” says John Fulena, vice president of production printing business group at Ricoh Americas Corporation.
5 comments:
As someone who had never heard of color management before, this article was very interesting. I did know that colors will print differently on different materials, and I also know that certain print jobs need to be very precise colors, but I never considered how impressive technology that could do this flawlessly would be. I think it is easy to be impressed by extraordinary technology that does extraordinary things, but easy to overlook equally extraordinary technology that completes ordinary tasks well. The complexity of a spectrophotometer embedded in a printer to actively gauge the exact color and adjust accordingly is amazing, but I know that had I not read this article, I could’ve used that printer, or a printer with similar technology, and not even considered the innovation that went into it. Now that I think about it, looking for the impressive nature is everyday things is important, not only in order to have more existing solutions to problems in mind when trying to find a solution to a different challenge, but also because it makes the world amazing.
I remember when hearing stories about printers using only black and white ink. Now printer can do all kinds of things. They can print in different colors, textures, and forms. Some printers even create a 3D form which is incredible to think about. Many designer and directors want a specific look or effect to show their vision. Through these new technological advances for printing, anyone can get what they want printed because of the amount of detail that is needed to create these effects. Some may say it's more work, but that's just a lazy excuse. If I want to have a print out of a blue sky for a design I want to make sure it's exactly what I envisioned. I thoroughly enjoy what this article is saying. Hopefully we'll see some new printing technology in the near future. I also wouldn't doubt if one of those advances came for Carnegie Mellon University.
Before this past summer, “Pantone” was a word that simply wasn’t in my vocabulary. I very quickly came to understand that color management across multiple materials and printers was not only a big headache, but of the upmost importance to dial-in right. Just as this article talks about, my office spent a non-insignificant amount of time sending and receiving samples to get clients’ Pantone colors correct on various prints. There definitely was a lot of the aforementioned time consuming “tweaking.” So I suppose that means that our printing vendor did not spent the requisite time getting our Pantone color (and all the others) correct on the material we wanted. This article definitely illuminated a topic that I really had only encountered in passing. It really is crazy how complex color is and how color management is a whole subfield! I also did not know about the different color standards besides Pantone.. G7 and ICC. I would be interested to learn the differences between these three color standards and understand each of their pros and cons.
This is pretty interesting, actually. Over this summer, I produced several information packets that had to match the company's signature colors and fonts. I found that this was particularly important in the same way that a director's vision must be carried out by the design team and stage manager: we had a Chief Creative Officer who had taken the time to design the company's logo and colors to the visual standard he and the rest of the senior staff members felt was what best worked for the company and ought to be used to represent it. I also am someone who greatly enjoys uniformity in my paperwork, and found it very frustrating when some things printed one shade of blue, and some printed another. For example, in my own Master Binder for one of our events, my outer title page did not match the color of the inner title page, so I ended up recoloring and reprinting them both to match, even if they weren't the exact company color. What will be interesting to see is whether printers over the years gain the technology to print to certain colors the way a computer types to different fonts. So instead of printing to what the computer tells it, specifying within the printer (which in this scenario has a whole archive of specific colors) what, say, a logo should look like. That way the printer would be able to adjust ink levels/combinations/etc. to fit the type of paper being printed on, rather than the other way around. Just an idea. I'm sure there would be plenty of flukes but it's interesting to consider.
With so much of what we do going digital, managing color is becoming more and more important. We, as consumers, often relate certain colors to brands, and if able to, shades of a color as well. While technology should be able to help break down color and more clearly, assuring the primary mixed are the same is growing ever more difficult. Digital printing has almost taken over in the printed fabrics, not only in the world of fashion, but also on Broadway. While original art may be drawn, it often then digitized and printed on yardages and helps in uniformity when creating many of the same garment. This has happened to many long running broadway shows, one of most well known is Lion King. The original set of costumes were all hand panted and dyed by artisans. While, the ease and cost effective of digital printing for yardage that continuing needs to be produced may far outweigh hand patting yardages, I really feel that it looses a bit of the dimensionally and artistry when the pattern are switched over to digital prints.
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