Color Management

By Robert Rock
P. Chan & Edward, Inc. - New York & Washington D.C. Offices

Color Management has been an essential part of the workflow throughout the pre-press and printing industry for many years now. As increasing numbers of designers and publishers roll up their sleeves to take a more active role in the desktop publishing pre-production workflow responsibilities, it is becoming ever more critical that an accurate color management workflow exist between the designer/publisher and the printer.

What Is Color Management? The fact is that all your production devices – scanners, digital cameras, monitors, and printers (including us, your commercial offset printer) – reproduce colors differently. Color Management is simply a way to set up your environment (your workflow) to allow all these devices to “speak the same language”, or to interpret and display color similarly, so that you can get accurate and predictable results from beginning to end. Simply put, it is a way to get colors to look the same regardless of the hardware or platform used to capture, view, or print the image.

What Does Color Management Do? We use Color Management software and advanced hardware devices (Colorimeters, Spectrophotometers, etc...) to create profiles for all our devices, but most importantly, for our commercial offset printers.

What is a profile? A profile provides a description of each device’s “color gamut” (the range of reproduceable color). You will use these profiles in your workflow resulting in an accurate translation from one device to the next, giving you consistent, accurate, and predictable color. The goal is for you to be able to view on your monitor what will come back to you on our press proofs and ultimately in your printed product. This can only be done if your software and monitor know exactly how the image will look when it is printed on our commercial offset printing presses. The ICC profile contains this information which is shared with your ICC compliant software programs (Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Quark Express, Pagemaker, etc...).

If you wish to learn more about Color Management and ICC Profiles, I can suggest a few very good resources. However, if you feel that you are ready to download our profiles and get started implementing them into your workflow, just click the link below to access our various profiles.

Additional Links to useful information about Color Management:

Norman Koren's Color Management Site - Excellent overview , leading into in-depth color management information and theory, as well as some additional links of interest. A very good starting point.

International Color Consortium - More in depth information including good explanations of "rendering intents".

Color Management.com - Products, Forums, News, Resources, etc...

ICC PowerPoint Slide Show - Prepared by International Color Consortium.

ICC / ICM Profiles Available:
Select the file for download. These are SEA files (Self Extracting Archives). When prompted, please save the extracted file (profile) to your desktop, or other location on your computer. The file must then be copied or moved into the appropriate folder/directory on your computer. Unless otherwise specified by your ICC compliant software, this directory is usually as follows:

Windows98, ME - Windows\System\Color
Windows2000 - WinNT\System32\Spool\Drivers\Color
WindowsXP - WINDOWS\System32\spool\drivers\color
MAC OS X - Users/(Users Home Folder)/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
MAC OS 9 -System Folder/ColorSync Profiles

TEAMS Gloss Art
TEAMS Matte Art

Technics Gloss Art
Technics Matte Art

KYS Gloss Art
KYS Matte Art
KYS Woodfree Uncoated

Dong-A Gloss Art
Dong-A Matte Art
Dong-A Woodfree Uncoated

BrightArts (Complete Gloss, Matte, Woodfree)

We are currently building additional profiles for our other vendors. These will appear on this page very soon. Also to come are detailed instructions on the use and implementation of these profiles in your workflow.

Bob Rock is a 34 year veteran of the printing industry, nearly 25 years of which have been with P. Chan & Edward, Inc. (NY and Washington, D.C. offices). His studies and training in printing and advanced color management techniques began with formal training at RIT ( Rochester Institute of Technology – ICC Color Management Systems Training) and PII (Printing Industries Institute of Illionois). He continues to stay current by frequently attending advanced training seminars and obtaining recurrent training from various equipment manufacturers.