Some advice on profiles, JPEGs and raw files
Ray Kroc, McDonalds® Corp. founder, believed luck was a divi¬dend of sweat. “The more you sweat, the luckier you get,” he’d say. He also fancied Peter Drucker’s principle of working to make a product, not money. To wit, “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and always put the customer first, success will be yours.” Indicative of this attitude, Kroc said he cared about hamburger more than anyone else.
Similarly, dedicated prepress persons care about prepress and its related gadgets more than (almost) anything else, because, like it or not, digital-color printing and its prepress counterpart are a lifestyle, not a job.
The rocket science of digital printing, prepress, color-manage¬ment and application profiles are making more news today than one would expect, and I’m glad to see it, because processing an image for print (prepress) is the most important ingredient in successful color printing.
Prints aren’t burgers
Although endless color-management stories adorn sign and digital-print magazine pages, the writers seldom address failure. Time, unlike overcooked burgers, isn’t cheap, nor are inks and media. Thus, a botched, large-format print can devour a job’s profits, unless failure is built within the price, as it should be.
Printing luck begins with preparation and planning, which should occur prior to buying a print machine or its accouterments: computers, software and a laminating device. Worsening the matter is interpreting the onslaught of press releases and advertisements that announce printer and software news. Still, sometimes, you’ve got to grab the ring.
Motorhead mindsets
True danger exists in thinking only about machines and not buying new software packages or upgrades. Although shop owners should confer with their design and prepress staffs before purchasing new software, they should also contemplate any design-group aversion to learn new systems. Such reluctance could delay a shop’s overall efforts.
Experienced sign designers should expertly run signmaking software and intimately know such image-editing software as Adobe Photoshop™, Lightroom™ or Corel’s advanced systems. In short, they should have such packages loaded and ready to make image modifications and changes, such as, broadening a color gamut by changing a color space from sRGB to aRGB 1998.
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