Colour Management
Do I really need this?
The vast majority of our customers don't want to understand and apply colour management techniques. As long as the job looks good and the colours are reasonably as expected and the pictures look clear and lifelike most people are happy. The thing is, how do you know that this will be the case? Unless you are an experienced graphic artist you don't. Furthermore, you need to know that your job will be OK before it is printed. That is what colour management is for.
Most of our customers seem to get by perfectly happily without knowing all this stuff and we are quite happy for them to do so but if you want to control your colour rather than take "pot luck" you will need some sort of system. We provide you with the calibration sheet and matching bitmap file to allow you to setup such a system.

What is Colour Management?
Colour management in it's most basic sense is controlling how colour is used in your artwork in a way that enables you to predict how a job will look when printed. You can use the colour management tools supplied with your software, operating system and hardware to set up your system for making colour judgements.
Here are the three main methods commonly used to achieve colour management :-
Unfortunately establishing a good colour management system involves time and effort and we know most of our customers will not want to be bothered. However, if you plan to create artwork for print on a regular basis you really do need to look into this.

How are Caralan helping me?
We provide the tools to enable you to set up your system to make ballpark colour judgements about your artwork BEFORE THE JOB IS PRINTED.
We guarantee to print your job within our standard ink density and dot gain ranges allowing you to set up your system to consistently predict roughly what your job will look like using our online proofs. We do not guarantee that your job will look exactly as you imagine it will. You are the artist and that is within your control not ours. However, if you follow the guidelines set out in this section of our website you should at a very minimum be able to see if anything is drastically wrong with your artwork. You should know if, for example, your scans are too light or too dark, or the faces are too pink, the grass is an unnatural livid green, the sky is too blue, etc., etc.

Caralan Online Proofs
Caralan online proofs are colour accurate before the application of dot gain. This means that, for example, a 50% tint area measured on the proof will actually produce something like 64% on paper. This is due to the mechanical process of printing and is quite normal. The ink is squashed onto the paper as it is printed, etc.
This colour accuracy means that an online proof can be opened in a bitmap editor such as photoshop, on a correctly set up computer and you will be able to see roughly what a job will look like when printed. You will also be able to print an online proof to a correctly calibrated inkjet printer and have a roughly accurate inkjet proof.

So, how do I set up my system to do this?
That's really down to you and it depends on the software and hardware you have. What we provide you with is a free printed colour calibration sheet and a corresponding downloadable online proof. To use these you need to look at the proof bitmap on your monitor and visually compare it with the printed calibration sheet. If the two don't look roughly the same in all areas - and this is virtually guaranteed with an un-calibrated system, then you cannot make colour judgements using your computer and you will need to adjust it. Once you have adjusted your system to accurately display or print our calibration sheet then it should also accurately display or print the online proofs we supply when you order a real job.

How good is this system?
Carefully and correctly set up it can be very good. We have used this system for years and it is the first thing we go to when we think a job looks wrong on press. It can never be perfect since computer monitors, inkjets and offset print create colour images in different ways. Also, we cannot guarantee perfect colour fidelity on press. We only guarantee that your job will be printed within our standard tolerances. Our standard tolerances are pretty good but perfection costs a lot more. That is why we say it enables you to make "ballpark" colour judgements.

Will you help me set up my computer to handle colour management?
No. Sorry, we just don't have the available staff to do this for you. If customers wanted to pay more for their printing then we could employ people to spend time doing this - but they don't.

Things to consider when setting up your system
Are you colour blind? This is a serious question. Many people are slightly colour blind and they don't know it. Unless you have had your eyes tested and you know for a fact that you aren't then you could be wasting your time.
You need to set your system up in a room where you can control the lighting. A room where lighting varies perhaps due to light from a window is no good. Your colour judgements will shift depending on the weather or time of day.
Ambient Light is best artificially set to approximate natural daylight rather than using real daylight which is a variable. A good start is to mix "daylight" flourescent tubes with ordinary tubes. Examine our calibration sheet in your room then examine it in natural daylight. When the two are the same you have got it about right.
The amount of room lighting that falls on your monitor can be a significant factor - avoid reflections from the room.
You'll need a good quality monitor. Without one you'll have difficulty matching anything. We us a high quality CRT monitor rather than a flat panel type because they are less sharp and more accurately reflect the feel of a printed photograph.
If you intend matching your scans of slides or transparencies to the originals you will need a calibrated lightbox or viewing booth. Photographers suppliers often have these at reasonable prices.

Where do I start?
The first place to look is the help system for the software you are using - search for "colour management", "colour profile", "colour setup", etc. This should present a lot of information. Similarly search the helpfiles for your operating system. Macintosh computers have had colour management built in for a long time and since Windows 2000 so have Microsoft based systems. Don't forget your hardware. Many monitors and graphics cards provide complex colour management routines but just simple brightness and contrast controls can make a lot of difference. Adobe Photoshop takes colour management very seriously and there is a wealth of information on the Adobe website. Your printer may have been shipped with various colour profiles on the setup CD that you probably didn't notice at the time. When you start to look for this sort of information you will find a lot of it, often in the form of PDF files you didn't know you had.

How is the Caralan system set up?
We do it the old fashioned way. Prior to Photoshop 5 colour profiles were not in common use and so a colour system was set up by altering the photoshop display, gamma and printing inks setup. We still prefer to use this method because our colour proofs are absolute. A 25% dot is a 25% dot plus applied gain on print. Consequently we don't need to map between theoretical colour spaces. Our colour space isn't theoretical it is the bottom line and everything has to match this. For our own artwork jobs we work entirely in CMYK and keep an old version of Photoshop set up for colour checking the image data produced by our files. The Photoshop "out of gamut" facility is quite useful when converting RGB images.
We are not saying that you should do it like this. Whatever works for you ...