Wide Format Imaging

Editor's note: I'd like to welcome Mike Adams, owner of Correct Color, to Wide-Format Imaging's stable of writers and columnists. Mike will be writing a series of color management articles throughout the year focusing on how to successfully implement a color management workflow in a wide-format shop.

"Well we've found that a good printer profile can cover for a whole host of sins." —Name withheld

Name withheld because that takes the prize as the dumbest statement I've heard to date in my travels as the Johnny Appleseed of wide-format color management. It was made by a fairly well-known solvent machine dealer in a good-sized American city and it's tantamount to saying, "Well we've found that if you make a good penthouse, you can just forget all about that pesky foundation."

If you want to get a good argument going amongst digital imaging types, one way to start is to bring up the whole idea of working color spaces: Which ones to work in and why; whether to work in RGB or CMYK; when to move from what space to what. Either people have an opinion on what the best color space to use is, or many have the opinion that it's just all completely too involved and intricate a subject for the poor unwashed masses in the industry to ever understand. (Which is decidedly untrue, by the way. I always set up working color spaces for my clients and they never fail to grasp the concept. Usually what people who say such a thing mean is that they don't understand it themselves, and it's easier to say their clients are too stupid to get it than to try and learn it themselves.)

Color spaces are the foundation of digital imaging. We couldn't do what we do without them.

Myself, I think of color management in my own terms of the 'front end' and the 'back end.' Basically and hopefully easily put, the front end is everything that happens before you send your files to the RIP, and the back end is everything that happens after. And what the gentleman I quoted above missed is that if the front end isn't right, the back end is doomed from the outset.

In the arena of wide-format imaging, the front end can be broken down into the two components of what color space to use, and how to make sure your color is unchanged from application to application. Of course, right off the fur can fly over the whole issue of whether to work in CMYK, or in RGB. And equally just as soon as the fur starts flying, people can spout commonly assumed falsities to prove their points. One key to remember is that if anyone ever says CMYK or RGB, and they don't follow up with what CMYK or what RGB, there's a good bet they're going to take you down a wrong path. That's because RGB and CMYK are both what are known as "device-dependent color spaces." The key, the absolutely fundamental, critical, write-this-down foundation of getting control of your color workflow, is that you can't say RGB or CMYK alone. Those aren't good enough definitions. You have to pick and define and implement both your RGB and CMYK spaces.