Color Proofing Goes Soft

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2004

How fast is fast enough? How cheap is cheap enough? In the never-ending quest to reduce costs and speed up the production process, the widespread adoption of digital proofing has made many editors happy. At roughly one-tenth the cost of traditional analog proofing (and without the delays associated with film output), inkjet proofing is enjoying a huge surge in popularity as publishers look to keep costs down.

Digital proofing with an inkjet printer converted days into hours, but the latest innovation to sweep the magazine business can convert hours into minutes! "Soft proofing" refers to the paper-free workflow process in which color-accurate proofs can be viewed on a calibrated computer monitor under controlled lighting conditions.

Jaded art directors may say this is no big deal; they've been passing around proofs made with Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) for several years now. Small enough to send as e-mail attachments, the ubiquitous PDF has changed the process of copy review forever. Unfortunately, PDFs alone do not guarantee color-accurate reproduction on computer monitors. While PDFs are often used within a soft-proofing workflow, they are only one piece of a larger and more complex puzzle.

MONITOR MADNESS

It's essential to know and understand how your monitor reproduces the characteristics of the intended printing press. A successful monitor-based proof also depends upon controlling the ambient room lighting around the computer screen, a consideration often ignored in creative departments and ad agencies. Finally, any serious attempt to replace Matchprint proofs with transient images made of light must also provide the equivalent of a China marker or a red ballpoint pen, so annotation tools and secure digital signatures are obligatory.

If this is starting to sound pricey, consider the alternative: If you can't trust your monitor, you'll have to rely on the printshop's more costly hard proofs, and that will cause delays - time you could have used to keep your ad deadlines open longer. Throw in the heartburn of inconsistent color between editorial and production departments, and the occasional rerun due to poor color balance, and you've made a compelling case for spending some serious cash on instituting a soft-proofing workflow.

New monitors aren't cheap, but today's market for computer displays contains some of the best values ever. Flat-panel displays are gaining ground for their bright, high-contrast images, but more affordable CRT monitors are still widely used in design studios and production departments. Getting a decent preview of your image's reproduction on press is possible even if your monitor is not top-of-the-line, but investing in a display marketed specifically to the graphic arts industry helps assure the image quality needed for critical color judgments.

What's a better choice, a CRT or an LCD?

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LCDs are considerably brighter than CRTs

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CRTs are more cost-effective (for now)

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LCDs don't flicker, and can stay calibrated longer

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CRTs offer wider viewing angles than LCDs

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LCDs are now offered by most major monitor vendors

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CRT production is being phased out by many manufacturers

How big should you buy? Large monitors provide the biggest boost to your workflow, reducing the amount of wasteful zooming and scrolling during the approval process. In this category, much of the action pits Apple's 23-inch Cinema Display HD flat-panel LCD against flat panels from ViewSonic and Sony, although NEC's new 40-inch LCD screen is likely to turn heads.

THE PERFECT PALLETTE

Just as with inkjet proofing, the key to successful monitor-based proof approval cycles lies in the use of accurate color management profiles. Also known by the name "ICC profiles" because they follow standards defined by the International Color Consortium, these digital files provide an analysis of the color reproduction characteristics of a specific device. Manufacturers of most professional-grade monitors provide generic ICC profiles that can be downloaded from their Websites, but these are poor substitutes for creating your own custom profiles. Monitors shift color and vary in intensity as they age - variations that can be quite pronounced. Try to avoid reliance on generic profiles, because the brightness of both CRT and LCD displays can decay considerably over time.

To create a monitor profile, you need a color-management "target," a measuring device that can read each color as it is sequentially displayed on the monitor, and profiling software that can analyze the difference between the color displayed and the values in the digital target. Measuring devices for use with color monitors are usually bundled with the software and target needed to create an ICC profile. Offerings range from affordable tools marketed to designers and ad agencies, such as Pantone's SpyderPRO monitor calibrator (bundled with Pantone's own OptiCAL color-management utility), to highly accurate devices intended for high-end commercial printshops, such as GretagMacbeth's SpectroScan (available from Monaco in combination with their MonacoPROFILER Platinum software, but also a bundle with GretagMacbeth's popular ProfileMaker Pro color-management application suite).