Quality color quandry

NEW ORLEANS -- When Beverly McCombs opens her morning paper, she goes right past the front page, features, the whole shebang, homing in on the Dillard's Department Stores ads.

An avid shopper? Sort of -- McCombs is the creative director for Dillard's, and she's looking for quality color reproduction in the Dillard's ads.

Usually, she finds it. Sometimes, she gets a jolt.

She and the man to whom she complains -- Kenneth Goodson of the Dallas Morning News -- were among a half-dozen color quality experts to explore ways to keep the creative directors of the world from going ballistic each morning when they see what newspapers have done to their ads in a session on Monday, June 23 at NEXPO '97.

Clearly, there's a lot yet to do: Despite the fact that newspapers constitute the largest single medium for advertising in the country, advertising color reproduction ranges from dead-on to deadly.

Paul Lynch of the Chicago Tribune and the NAA's Quality Task Force showed slides of the same Chrysler Corp. ads, printed in different papers. Even projected across the semi-lit convention center meeting room, the quality swings were obvious -- huge variations in the brightness of the image, from washed-out to "Chrysler-by-Twilight"

Color balance, too, was all over the map -- red cars turning brown, faces turning green.

Complain? The creative directors of the world could be forgiven for putting out mob contracts.

But there is hope. In fact, there is even a budding solution: Press profiling, a process pioneered by Ed Lehr, new technology manager of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the NAA Color Management Work Group he chairs.

This is a technique of matching the characteristics of the printing press to the ad (or editorial color) being printed.

Simple, not cheap, but effective.

Every press has its own profile. You arrive at it by printing a test "target" on each press, taking copies not from the start of the run but from the "sweet zone," when ink, water and press speed are all running optimally.

Then you'll analyze the targets, not with the standard densitometer, but with a fancier spectrophotometer which measures not just ink density but color.

Checking the target is time-consuming -- it can range from an hour using a manual spectrophotometer to about 25 minutes with an automatic model.

Then all that data is put into a computer, which chews on it for five or 10 minutes and spits out a press profile.

If you have only one press, you're done -- but who has only one press?

If you have multiple offset presses, for example, you can average the data together, or pick the best of several profiles to represent your whole press line.

If you're in transition mode -- some units are still letterpress, some flexo, others offset, you'll want a profile for each type of press.

Then you'll apply it to the ads or editorial color scheduled to run on that particular press.

Obviously, you'll want to get out of transition mode as fast as you can, since this is a royal pain. But meantime, you ought to be printing the best color possible no matter which process you're using.

The profiling process also extends, as it should, into editorial. Here, provided you have control of the color from stem to stern, you can make the same press targets work for you by calibrating the monitors on your pre-press photo-correction Macs to the profile.

Then you can adjust local and wire photos to achieve the best color your press can deliver.

If your color management software profiles can be shared (and Lehr cautions against buying profiling software that can't be), you can put it up on the World-Wide Web so ad transmission outfits like AP's AdSEND can pre-profile all color ads they're sending you.

For that matter, if AP can do that for color ads, why couldn't it profile editorial wirephotos as well? That means your pre-press staff has only to worry about local color. Sounds like a good use of AP dues to us.

The bottom line, of course, is to make mornings become electric for folks like Beverly McCombs, allowing her to be dazzled by rich editorial color on the front page, nod approvingly at the Dillard's ads -- and turn directly to the comics like the rest of us.

-- John Bryan

A production of The Cole Group, Copyright (c) 1997, All Rights Reserved.

Last updated: 4 July 1997.

Return to The Cole Pages