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Color Management
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Recommendations:
- Buy the
best monitor you can afford. Color is your business, after
all. A good monitor will be capable of displaying good color,
and it will have the RGB and other built-in controls you need
to calibrate it properly. It will also stay in calibration longer.
It doesnt do you much good to calibrate your monitor if
it quickly goes out of tune. A good monitor can save you money
in the long run because you will not need as many proofing cycles
to get the color right.
- Control
the viewing environment around your monitor. Ideally you would
bring the entire room into conformance with an agreed upon specification.
But at least eliminate the obvious causes of variation-close the
blinds, dont use a dimmer switch on the lights.
- Use a
viewing booth. Buy a 5000K variable intensity desktop viewing
booth for viewing proofs and set it up adjacent to your monitor.
- Calibrate
your monitor regularly. You can use Apple ColorSync or Adobe
Gamma.
- Most importantly,
choose a printer who can give you a proof that matches exactly
what will be produced on press. This is not as easy as it
sounds. You cant just ask your printer. All printers sell
contract proofs, and all printers will tell you that they will
match their proof on press - it is after all a contract
proof. But unless the printer has gone through a rigorous process
to tune the press and proofing device, it will be impossible to
match on press certain colors that the proofing device produces.
- Become
familiar with the differences between your monitor and your printers
output. One way to do this is to carefully compare the file
you sent to a printer as displayed on your monitor with the printed
product (and the proof) that the printer produced. Even better,
compare a special test image as displayed on your
monitor with the same image as output by your printer. When working
with Courier, use the image on the inside back cover of this book,
and compare it with the corresponding file that you can download
by clicking here.
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