Standardization and the Color Wars
Consistency aids quality in the printing process, especially when it comes to achieving high-quality color reproduction on newsprint. That familiar message received emphasis at a Monday morning workshop on the fundamentals of printing and in interviews around the show.
While national-ad revenue for all media totaled $50 billion in 1997, newspapers captured only $5.2 billion, in part because of problems with color reproduction, said Eric Wolferman, NAA senior vice president of technology.
If consistency provides the basis for quality color reproduction, standardization and attention to detail help achieve it, said Ken Kirkhart, vice president of production for USA Today. The national newspaper prints on 40 presses at 36 print sites with 11 press models and newsprint from 16 mills. Kirkhart's four keys to keeping those color copies accurate and consistent:
- Make sure equipment is properly and precisely calibrated, and
perform maintenance on a regular schedule.
- Standardize materials.
- Train and test staff.
- Clarify procedures and write everything down, so work is performed the same way each time.
Manufacturing standards are important, emphasized Robert Hacker, consultant and professor of printing management and sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Everything in a system affects the final product quality.
Training photographers helped greatly improve color photos after a switch from letterpress to offset printing at The Columbus Dispatch, said Karl Kuntz, the Ohio paper's managing editor for graphics. Photographers used to shooting black-and-white film and making adjustments in the darkroom cannot follow that philosophy in shooting color. "We had to get photographers to understand the whole process," he said. That required classes, always small and often one-on-one.
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KKS Kaneda Kikai Seisakusho Ltd. provided a colorful demo as it pitched its high-speed CTP. |
William Moore, director of operations for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, described how the process of applying to the IFRA Colour Quality Club helped foster the teamwork required to maintain good color quality. The Plain Dealer, one of 71 entries from 21 countries, became the only U.S. 1996-98 member of the 26-paper club.
Suppliers noted that good pre-press management usually minimizes problems at the press, and the cumbersome process for calibrating input devices, monitors and output equipment eases with integrated color-management systems, user-friendly devices and standard file formats.
Monaco Systems Inc. of Andover, Mass., offered MonacoPreview, a PhotoShop plug-in proofing window, and MonacoProfiler 2.5, with profiling software for scanners, digital cameras, film recorders, monitors, printers and presses. It includes a colorimeter for use with monitors.
Iain Trevor Pike, product manager for X-Rite Inc. of Grandview, Mich., said his firm's ColorShop 2.5 software package is a suite of color selection and integration tools that can assist designers with color choice, complimentary color creation, screen previewing, proofing and printing. ColorShop helps support accurate proofing by directly comparing the gamut of monitors and presses. X-Rite also offers a line of color-quality control hardware, including colorimeters, densitometers, scanners and spectrophotometers, many bundled with the ColorShop package.
Working with Apple Computer Inc., Adobe Systems of San Jose is moving to greatly increase support of International Color Consortium device-independent profiles across all its applications. Version 5 of PhotoShop will display a gamut of screen profiles that can be attached, rather than just applied, to files.
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Monotype Systems Inc. demonstrated CTP- integrated production-management systems. |
New technology such as computer-to-plate and networks pose extra complexities in the quest to improve color. Tom Shafer, director of production technologies from Thomson Newspapers in Stamford, Conn., said in a post-show interview that the industry needs even more standardization. "The front end becomes more sophisticated, has more options, has more things you can do. The back end can't keep up with it. They don't have a standard to communicate what the color should be."
The NAA Quick Start Guide to Quality Reproduction--a laminated, step-by-step brochure based on findings of the NAA Color Quality Task Force--debuted at NEXPO. To acquire a copy, call NAA's Cheryl Payne at (703) 902-1840.