Alwan and Enfocus announce PDF Normalizer

This sounds interesting, a PDF color normalizer. Alwan is strong in color and Enfocus in PDF. A good match. But normalizing files to a standard color space presupposes that you know the color space of the supplied file...hardly a given. Then there is the $10,000 price.

The Los Angeles planning commission continues to dither on large format advertising. If this were a picturesque New England village I would probably feel differently, but this is LA!

In a city as generally blight-filled as Los Angeles, outdoor advertising is frequently the only part of the landscape that has any distinction at all. Sunset Blve is one of the most interesting drives in the city precisely because it has loads of outdoor advertising art.

Free the billboards!

HP Announces GRACoL certification for Indigo

"HP today announced its HP Indigo 5000, 5500 and 7000 digital press models have become the first digital color production systems to earn General Requirements for Applications in Commercial Offset Lithography (GRACoL) certification, a graphic arts standard for quality color printing".

Interesting. I've just set up a couple of Indigos to G7 specs, and they do a fantastic job, but I'd say that drift is still a potential problem...will they stay G7??? Read the whole thing: HP GRACoL Announcement

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

Abhay Sharma, judging member of the IPA Board and chair of Ryerson University School of Graphic Communications Management, recently said, “Achieving low Delta-E values is no longer an issue for proofing technology today. Now it is more about workflow and ease of use.”

Amen to that. Get good close color and stay on top of it. And don't worry about the ultra-tiny deltaE variations. Publishing Executive has a good top-10 list for sensible color management>

Color Management in Firefox??

OK, most of us print guys don't bother with color management on the web, but it can be done. Rob Galbraith has a good tutorial.

The Color Blue

The color blue (Cyan plus Magenta in the CMYK world) is not only one of the most-used colors in graphic design, it is also one of the colors in which the human eye can most easily see differences.

The blues used in corporate design...Pepsi blue, Morton salt blue, Quaker Oats blue....are easy to identify and each is unique. Too bad that blue can also one of the toughest colors to reproduce accurately.

It may not help that the blue solid defined in the G7 characterization data set could have an internal inaccuracy.

Equal parts of Cyan and Magenta have a characteristic purplish cast through the range from light to dark...untill you hit solid, when the a* value dips and the cast takes a definite bluish turn. The source seems to be the original ISO 12647 data set, which was used as the basis for G7. The ISO committee recanted at the last minute and shifted the a* values for the solid blue overprint up by a full 5 steps of a* value, but G7 held steady.

Which is right? Many report that the G7 blue looks fine, but more are finding that they have to hold back on magenta density to keep their blues from going more reddish than the proof.

The G7 committee is taking input on this and it looks like the color blue will be revisited soon.