Peter Figen
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 p.2 #13 · Soft Proofing - Do you use it? | |
"1) It worked because you have the extensive experience and expensive tools necessary to create very accurate custom profiles."
I don't deny that I've spent the money to be able to do this and spent an equal amount of time learning to do it right, but I'll also say that it's all been worth it in the amount of repeat business I get in prepping files and in the number of times the very first print on my own printers is the one I go with.
2) You used CYMK dot percentages needed to be for ideal reproduction to guide the editing, as much or dare I say more so than the soft proofing. Granted it was the soft proofing via the CYMK profile which produced the percentages to evaluate, but "checking the dots" has always been the benchmark for predicting outcome for offset and that requires quite a bit of experience to do successfully.
Without the soft proofing, the dot percentages are only what they are. If you did your conversion with the wrong profile and then set the endpoints or midtone to what you thought was right, your results would still suck. When I make new custom profiles for a printer I've never used before, I'll often Assign other profiles to see how close the new profile is to others I use, and of course, compared back to the canned Adobe profiles. There are almost always significant visual differences that would be enough to ruin a job if you used the wrong profile by mistake.
3) The customer viewed and approved hard copy proofs "from the printer" made on the high end proofing system which you had accurately profiled. But the $64,000 question is, has the job printed and did the production run match the hard and soft proofs? That's where the perceptual rubber hits the road and all the fun stuff you can't predict with any pre-press proofing begins
True, but we've done so many jobs at this printer, that I know that the actual piece almost always looks BETTER than the proofs. I think that job is on press today. If a printer can't match or at least come very close to their proofing system, then they have a problem. Of course, there are many variables on press, but it's the job a good press operator to match or better the proofs. This job has gotten a lot easier in recent years with direct to plate and computerized control of modern presses. Makeready now takes far less time with fewer wasted sheets than ever, and being able to save out targeted density points for a particular job makes it even easier to get to where you want or need to be.
Y'know, you can complain about how much this stuff costs, and, trust me, it was a LOT more expensive when I started buying into it, or you can look at it from a different perspective. I prefer to look at owning and using this technology as another part of the toolset that I need to produce the best quality product. I mean, for the most part, you could probably get away with Photoshop Elements, but you're using Photoshop CS3 or 4 I bet. While it might be nice for Adobe to provide more tools and the printer makers to include spectrophotometers in every printer, it's not there yet, and it seems to me that even with economy of scale, it won't make much sense to put a spectro into every single consumer level printer. It makes a lot more sense to do what they do now - provide reasonably accurate canned profiles that are "good enough" for most people while keeping the cost low enough to sell enough product to be profitable. For those that need more accuracy and precision, you're just going to have to pony up to the bar and spend what it takes to produce the results you want. Remember that for less than a hundred bucks, you can get yourself a very good profile made.
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