Seeing shades of red - common - standardizing color management systems for color printing

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 15, 1994 by Debby Patz

Imagine this: You scan a slide using Polaroid's SprintScan 35, bring it up on your RasterOps 21 monitor, and, after working on it in Photoshop, send it to a Canon CLC10 printer for proofing. All the while, absolute color fidelity is maintained by a color management system--a combination of software intended to standardize colors from input through to proof--and beyond that to the press.

Alas, as anyone who works regularly with desktop color knows, fantasizing about such ease and consistency is all that's possible right now. Says Steve Swen, engineering manager for Apple's ColorSync 1.0 color management system, "to make a CMS work from the end-user point of view, all applications touching the process, from scan to print, need to work together to make it happen." And that just hasn't happened yet.

The need for color management systems arose with the magazine industry's embrace of open systems in desktop publishing. While the adoption of Adobe PostScript as a crossplatform standard for digital page description has made it possible for publishers to string together different manufacturers' computers, software and printers, digital color remains the last frontier where manufacturers maintain proprietary description languages.

Indeed, at this point "it may be impossible to transfer data from one color management system to another," says Tom Dunn, a prepress consultant based in Vista, California, and executive director of the Open Systems Color Association. But, as the 400 frustrated desktop-publishing aficionados at San Francisco's Seybold seminar "Color Management: Standards and Beyond" attested in September, things must change.

Enter ICC, the Mountain View, California-based International Color Consortium, founded last year as the ColorSync Profile Consortium by Apple, Microsoft, Eastman Kodak and five others. It has established a profile, or map, to describe how to go from a devicedependent color space (such as a scanner) to interchange color space and back (to, for example, a monitor). And the group hopes this profile--which is available on the Internet--will become the industry standard. "The goal," says ICC chairman Todd Newman, "is that whenever you buy a peripheral, the profile will be built in," thus ensuring the successful color translation by CMS from device to device, regardless of its manufacturer. Indeed, within the next year, upgraded products from consortium members, such as Windows 95, Apple ColorSync 2.0 and Agfa Pro Foto Tune, all of which incorporate these profiles, will begin to ship. Other manufacturers, like Hauppauge, New York-based Linotype-Hell and Canon USA, in Lake Success, New York, have pledged support to the standardization effort as well.

But the magazine industry isn't holding its breath. "We decided we didn't need [a CMS] because our goal is speed," says Joe Steiner, director of editorial systems at Newsweek. Steiner corrects color as closely as possible on an in-house system, and then conveys more changes over the phone to the printer. CMS manufacturers claim to maintain color all the way to a high-end printer. Nonetheless, says Gary Poyssick, product development manager at the Tampa, Floridabased graphic arts training firm Against The Clock, "when it comes down to final proofing, no one in publishing will approve something off a [standard, low resolution] printer. No one."

John Pepper, art director at Rodale's Backpacker, agrees: "When it comes to picking final colors, everyone goes to the print book instead of relying on what they see on the screen anyway."

Newman acknowledges that it will be a while before the profiles--assuming they do become the accepted standard for consistent color description among different devices--have an impact and desktop publishers begin to trust in color management. In approximately three years, he predicts, "people will say color management works. In five years, it's going to be 'yeah, you color manage that.'" In the meantime, don't throw out those printer's proofs.