Viva! The revolution! Bill Atkinson in LLVJ #16

[Ray Maxwell]

I was so delighted to see the interview with Bill Atkinson in LLVJ #16.

In this interview he describes how he used Color Management to convert the printing process from an old world craft that uses trail and error to a process controlled manufacturing process.  The sad thing is that he had to go to Japan to make it happen.  He was unable to find a printer in North that was willing to adopt his methods when he wanted to print his book.  In the interview he describes how the Japanese company has now adopted Color Management to do printing cheaper and of higher quality.

I am retired and no longer work in the industry and can speak freely.

I believe the printing industry resists the adoption of this technology for several reasons:

1.  It is not easy.  It requires a lot of knowledge and expertise to do it properly.  There is a cost to bringing in experts and training your staff.

2.  Printers do not want printing to become a commodity.  This would mean that all printers would print a very high quality product and print to a standard.  This would allow the print buyer to send a file to multiple printers and take the lowest bid.  Currently they work on a one on one basis and use trial and error at the expense of the print buyer.

If you want to see what I wrote about this topic a year ago, go to this URL:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial...e-problem.shtml

Let the discussion begin.

More power to you Bill, I am delighted to find at least one person who agrees with me.  His, book speaks for itself.

Ray Maxwell

[Roy]

Hi Ray,

Bill has an interesting download on his web site about having his book, Within the Stone, printed in Japan. It is a big PDF slideshow (65 MB!), full of great images both from the book and about the making of it:
http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSha...the%20Stone.pdf
For anyone with knowledge of the printing industry it is a treat to see these images of unpretentious Japanese printers working with Bill using modern colour management, Heidelberg presses and speciality inks to push offset printing to its limits.

There is also an article on Mike Johnston's blog:
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/t...n_the_ston.html

[Ray]

I've been using Bill Atkinson profiles with my Epson 7600 for a few years now (thanks Bill   ).

But my major hassle with the printing process is getting the proof image, with simulate paper color ticked (in PS), to look like the image before I ticked 'proof colors'.

If I ignore the out-of-gamut warnings, no major problem regarding the screen appearance, but often problems for the print. How do you guys cope with this?

Photoshop has a lot of auto features which sometimes works well, such as auto-levels, auto-contrast, auto-color etc.

Is it technologically possible, I wonder, to have an 'auto proof color' feature which makes whatever adjustments are necessary to get the simulated image on screen, in relation to a particular printer/ink/paper profile plus a specified rendering intent (if necessary), looking as close as possible to the adjusted image prior to going into proof setup?