(Intelli)Tuning Photos
by John Bryan
Pithy Aphorism: What you see is what you get.
Color Pre-press Manager: Oh, shut up.
When newspapers first started printing color, getting production machines in sync was sort of like herding goats—if they went the way you pointed, it was only because you’d guessed correctly.
We’ve since discovered the way to tame color is by tweaking it. But here’s the rub: You have to know what to tweak and when.
At the El Paso Times, they’re working to automate the process with Agfa Corp.’s Macintosh-based program called IntelliTune, the product of some “geniuses in Belgium,” as Production Director Gary Hughes describes them, combined with two years of testing at his paper. The program runs photographs through a set of carefully constructed scripts that apply subtle corrections, smoothing out the bumpy vagaries of all the equipment through which the work flows.
But wait a minute: scripts, color calibration, Macs? Don’t we all have a program like this called Adobe Photoshop? And didn’t we buy a gazillion copies?
“If I had to relate it to anything, it’d be Photoshop,” says Joan Phillips, NAA’s pre-press technology manager. “But [Intelli-Tune] is really going up against the other color managers.”
The difference? Unlike magazines, our more-absorbent newsprint can stand total area ink coverage of only perhaps 260 percent without overloading, and the other color-management systems can’t be set that low. IntelliTune can, Phillips says, because it’s been created specifically for newspapers. Actually, it was created for European papers, causing some early problems, Hughes says.
“When they brought it to us, everything was in metric,” he explains. “But those things were relatively simple” to fix.
Of more concern were the subtleties of color correction. The Times’ photography, both editorial and advertising, is 100 percent digital, which Hughes credits with helping stabilize the calibration process. Another challenge was giving Photoshop operators the time to develop a trusting relationship with IntelliTune. “We have some very talented operators, but they had never seen a color-management system before. So even when they ran a photo through the script and it looked beautiful, they were still opening it up in Photoshop and trying to fine-tune it.”
Ironically, El Paso is using this color system mostly for black and white, and only some advertising color—particularly real-estate and automotive products which lend themselves to mass production. A double irony with a half-twist: Hughes says he’s saving so much time that he was able to pull a full-time person out of the imaging department. She became Hughes’ quality-control manager—and the author of all the scripts he’s using to run IntelliTune.
In fact, when the system is installed soon at the Reno Gazette-Journal, Hughes says he’s suggested going the black-and-white route there as well, so staffers can focus on editorial color. That way, “the black-and-white automation actually improves the color,” he says.
Bryan is a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial-pagination project team. E-mail, john.bryan@latimes.com.
Integrating InDesign
by Bob Sims
Adobe Systems Inc.’s InDesign—an advanced page-layout software program which made a major splash at NEXPO®99—is still too new to be widely used. It hasn’t yet broken Quark Inc.’s hold on the market or even significantly dented QuarkXPress’ 2 million-plus worldwide user base.
In addition, a marketing hiccup in the pricing of InDesign’s 1.5 bug-fix and new-feature release drew heavy criticism from the graphic-arts community. (The release now is priced at $29.95 for the 60 days following its March 29 introduction.)
What does it all mean to the average newspaper editor or production manager? Not much...yet. And maybe not for years. But when InDesign gets into the hands of enough designers and is coupled with an ever-burgeoning stable of software developers, a “critical mass” will be reached, argues Gary Cosimini, business-development director of the San Jose company.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg thing,” he says, noting that it may take years before InDesign reaches its full potential. “We have to be patient. People have to be reassured that it will continue to be developed.”
InDesign, says Cosimini, is being embraced by hundreds of developers, from new businesses devoted to writing plug-ins to older ones fully integrating it into their own products. For instance, Dutch firm WoodWing Software’s first two products are InDesign plug-ins. Digital Technology International of Springville, Utah, in contrast, has completely integrated InDesign into its products and dropped its proprietary pagination engine.
But most independent vendors sidling up to InDesign are like Baseview Products Inc. The Ann Arbor, Mich., company has for years written crafty extensions to tie Quark’s ’XPress into its software. Now it is adding InDesign plug-ins, company officials say, to give customers the best of both worlds.
“I don’t know if newspapers are going to switch or not,” says Jeff Gapp, product manger for Baseview’s ProductionManagerPro. “They need to have choices.”
Together, ProductionManagerPro and InDesign manage, assemble, distribute and print ads. Baseview’s product tracks all ad components, including fonts, graphics, photos and logos, while InDesign handles design and assembly. But ProductionManagerPro also can yield ’XPress or Multi-Ad Creator files.
Baseview’s IQue editorial system also will incorporate InDesign. The summer release will feature not only Portable Document Format capability, but also more-precise type control, says product manager Jack Rosenzweig. Copy-editing features will come from Baseview’s own software or another Adobe product called InCopy.
Sims is a Kissimmee, Fla., free-lancer. E-mail, BKScoop@aol.com.
The Proof is
on the Newsprint
The Orlando Sentinel has gotten into newsprint proofing in a big way.
The paper recently purchased seven SeeColor raster-image-processor proofing systems from the Mountain View, Calif., vendor. Their newsprint proofs are used to preview the Sentinel’s color pages before they are sent to press.
The SeeColor RIPs are attached to 36-inch-wide HP DesignJet 2000CP printers installed in the paper’s editorial and pre-press departments. End rolls of newsprint supply the printing medium. At four remote bureaus, the RIPs are installed with Epson Stylus Pro 3000 ink-jet printers, which use heavyweight newsprint-colored paper supplied by Konica Graphic Imaging of Glen Cove, N.Y., to print broadsheet-size proofs. Each proofer is calibrated to match the newspaper’s presses.
The RIPs are linked to both the Sentinel’s CCI Europe front-end and Macintosh network. Color ads or broadsheet-size pages are quickly printed from digital files, avoiding the delays and material costs associated with conventional proofing methods.
“The volume of color proofing has grown dramatically since we installed our SeeColor proofer,” says Lois Chandler, Orlando Sentinel Communications’ systems database engineer. “The savings have been enough to justify two more SeeColor proofing systems next year.”