[Openicc] Print and monitor Color Pipeline

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 26, 2011, at 5:00 PM, Jon Cruz wrote:

> 
> On Jan 27, 2011, at 8:51 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
>> I think RGB and CMYK are control signals, and should be abstracted away from users. I don't even like photographers dealing with RGB. It's unintuitive, clunky, and in color managed apps there's no correlation between actual RGB values and the ones displayed on screen anyway. So I'd prefer LCH based tools - or better JCH or IPT.
>> 
>> And so you can imagine how I feel about CMYK.
> 
> Although I can agree that far too many people focus on CMYK who should not, there are a lot of cases where more precise control is needed. Screening and droplet control might be a bit beyond what many need, but trapping, knockout, black text, etc. are often best left to the professional graphic designer. It is in trying to make back end systems "too smart" that we often get into trouble.

I understand. Sometimes a pen and paper are easier than firing up a wordprocessor.

But design to print now works on that 80 / 20 rule where it's being designed for 80% of the market. And that 80% do not need to be working with CMYK. They just need to specify "black type" and expect the correct thing to happen on various kinds of output. If you build a PDF that explicitly states black text is 100%K only, you now have a PDF that isn't so transportable to different kinds of printing processes. You haven't actually established the overall intent, which is "the darkest type that doesn't get fuzzy or ill tempered when printed".


> This also really comes into play when you go to print with spot inks involved. Whether solid spot inks, glossy overlay, etc. those using them often need more control. 

Solid spot is cake. Tinting spot colors, or printing them with other inks and predicting what it will look like is hard. That falls into the 20% part of the market. The vast majority is really predictable CMYK only stuff. Look at what Blurb has done for books.


> 
> And to use the car analogy, although one might not need to know the voltage it takes for cylinders to fire, it *is* quite handy to have a tachometer on their dash. Sure, you could just have a governor on the engine to reduce problems, but seeing the proximity to the redline can be a better and more flexible solution.

Ok. But most people, at least 80%, aren't going anywhere near redline. Most people drive automatic transmissions in the U.S. also. If you drive manual transmission, tachometer is nice. Same for flying airplanes, it directly means something about the system. CMYK in most workflows doesn't really mean anything. Especially in portable PDF workflows to unknown destinations, it's really meaningless.

I think most developers, especially for Linux, want to build software most people will use. I think that's more often the 80% of the time rather than the 20% users, who are invariably going to companies like Adobe, Enfocus, Apago, and Global Graphics for a solution.




Chris Murphy