A quick question out to those looking to post... What is your color management workflow?

Is it involved to the point of calibrating every input and output device or is it as simple as what the customer wants the customer gets?

Do you have someone dedicated to color management?

Do you even care about color management?

Have you used a densitometer or spectrophotometer?

Do you measure color change? Do you know what Delta E is?

Have you taken any classes on color management? Did you learn anything? Would you reccommend them to others?

These are a few starter questions that hopefully will get the color management discussion going.

All input and output devices, and monitors are ICC profiled. Our default colourspaces are 'ColorMatchRGB' for RGB and 'US SWOP Coated v2' for CMYK.

Every device is calibrated (if possible) and profiled. Customers can expect us to get within a Delta E of 4 or less in a reproducible colour.

Yes. He's part time now, but he was responsible for implementing our system. Now several of us are trained to maintain everything.

It's one of our main selling features, and completely necessary in our shop. We also profile our customer's monitors/printers as a service.

We use densitometers for calibration, and spectrophotometers for profiling and measuring colours.

We do. Our standard for colour consistency (during a run or from proof to final) is a Delta E of 4 or less. Anything above that needs attention. If we match a customer's specified colour within Delta E of 4 or less and they want further correction, it is chargeable.

All R&D and training has been in-house.

silversurfer,

It sounds as though color management is well developed at your shop? Was it a painful implementation? You mentioned calibration of color devices being available as a service, has that helped you to maintain consistant and anticipated output?

How many devices do you manage color between?

That's what prompted our CMS initiative: the amount of devices. Not just the amount, the various types of technology.

For colour output, we use:

- Xerox iGen, Docucolor 2045 & 240 (colour laser printers)
- 50" Mimakis (solvent-based large format inkjet vinyl printers)
- HP Designjet 5500 and 4000 (dye-based large format inkjet printers)
- Oce Lightjet 430 (50" photo-based RGB laser large format printer)

and for scanning:
- Cruse Syncron (50"x75" large format scanner)
- Epson Expression 836XL (11x17 flatbed)
- Vidar Titan and Graphtec CS600pro (sheetfed large format scanners)

To get any consistency whatsoever, it was necessary to implement CMS.

Was it painful? No, not at all. In fact, not only is there productivity savings (labour involved in colour matching), but the quality is actually improved.

Our biggest problem was with Xerox, or more specifically, DocuSP. The CMS built into DocuSP didn't work. We had to escalate the problem until finally the lead engineer of the colour team for DocuSP came here from Rochester. We demonstrated how it didn't work, then he said "Huh...". Three months later there was a patch released for DocuSP, called 'The Pacblue Patch' that fixed the CMS. But you would not BELIEVE the resistance Xerox put up. Not only to admitting that something didnt' work, they actively discouraged us from using profiles with their products. I liked to point out that Xerox is part of the ICC, they helped develop colour profiles. They didn't care for that.

The beauty of the system is that we can scan something on any of our scanners, apply a profile, then print it to several different printers and achieve similar results. We can also load a colour profile into Colorthink, then open an image and tell immediately if we can achieve the colours on the device. If a customer needs something matched to a sample (like previous offset printed), we can simple measure it, and then input the proper values. The time saving is immense.

Any more questions, ask away...