Re: Color management in "Real WORld Photoshop"

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I'm just empirically matching the Epson print to the (Matthews Paint) 
swatchbook, in order to achieve a plausibly realistic result. What I mean 
is, if the building is supposed to be painted Moss Green 1B-4C, that the 
color of the printout of my illustration of the building matches the 
paint chip 1B-4C. What I am manipulating to achieve this is the custom 
color formula in Illustrator (using CMYK), since there is no preexisting 
formula for these paints. I have found that once I get a grasp on a few 
colors in my palette, I can derive the others with not too much 
tinkering, and then select the color mode that gives me the best onscreen 
preview. Possibly due to my many years of experience predicting CMYK 
output from screen images (long predating color inkjet printers), I don't 
have a great deal of difficulty doing this. In one sense, it doesn't 
really matter how the monitor displays the color for this purpose, 
although I have found that my calibration is reasonably close (Trinitron, 
gamma 1.8, 5000K). I compare the print under daylight conditions since 
architecture (obviously) is not viewed under controlled lighting.

I was not recommending this as a procedure for general use, since it is 
based upon subjective "eyeball" color comparison, not to mention it is 
not "portable" from system to system. I was just suggesting that the 
Epson (1520 in my case) was capable of consistent output, and a 
reasonable correspondence between screen and printout, in Illustrator. If 
you were trying to achieve an "objective" color match, say to Pantone 
colors, for which the formulas are already determined, I think a more 
rigorous approach might be helpful. That said, I find that I get 
reasonable results with many Pantone colors, as it stands.

A Spectrophotometer sounds pretty nice, though...

CDTobie@aol.com had this to say:

>
>In a message dated 1/10/00 5:58:03 PM, mvheim@studiolimage.com writes:
>
>>Illustrator 8 for Mac supports Colorsync, and has an on-screen print 
>>preview mode that actually is very useful. You're kind of on your own to
>>
>>guess which mode (absolute colorimetric, relative colorimetric) to use,
>>
>>but a few test prints and consistent color is really no problem. I've 
>>been matching paint colors to a commercial swatchbook in architectural
>>
>>renderings.
>
>What on earth are you matching? Screen color to the swatchbook (under what 
>lighting?) and then to the printer? What type of monitor profile? What type 
>of printer profile? Lots of variables here...
>
>I do it as scientifically as I can manage... spectrophotometer reading of 
>the 
>swatch, then import that to a pallet, then print to an appropriate CMYK RIP 
>profile, and I still can't get the results I want without ICC AutoFlow...
>
>
>C. David Tobie
>Design Cooperative
>CDTobie@designcoop.com
>


--

===============================
Max Heim
mvheim@studiolimage.com
_______________________________
Studio L'Image/San Francisco
415 643 9309 : 415 643 9307 fax
_______________________________
Studio L'Image/New York
212 242 3366 : 212 242 3399 fax

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