JimRaffel.com » guidelines

Industry Meeting Displays Power of Many

JimRaffel — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:45:06 +0000

Earlier this week I attended two days of meetings focused around graphic communications industry specifications, standards and best practices.

There is nothing glamorous about this work. Almost 30 of us crammed into a small conference room. Not at a fancy hotel but graciously offered at no cost by Kodak (one of the member companies of the organization). Additional members joined in via Webex and a conference call. For two days competitors, customers, trading partners all put those hats down to do what’s best for the community as a whole.

In retrospect it’s rewarding work. Our graphic communications industry (the printing and pre-press parts of it) have been hit hard by the economy and the radical shift in the way people communicate and get their news. As a group we discussed and worked on ways to help make the people and companies in the trenches lives a little easier.

I went looking for a way to help and give back to an industry that has been so good to me. I found it by offering my social media expertise to the organization. As much as I may know about color, several of the people in that room have forgotten more about it than I will ever know. It’s beholden on all of us to find what we can offer to the community and give freely. I’ve written about “give to get” before and if you’re here you get that concept.

Everybody in the room contributed over the two days. Perspectives, ideas, and comments came from all quarters. As a result our industry is a little better today than it was on Monday. The lesson is to show up somewhere you normally don’t go and see if you can make a difference.

Where can you make a difference? Head over there and give it a shot then stop back and let us know how it turned out.

#69 IDEAlliance Proofing Summit in Review

JimRaffel — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Recently I attended the IDEAlliance Proofing Summit held in conjunction with the Publishing Business Conference and Expo at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. During the one day summit I managed to take three pages of notes focused on the meeting’s key topic of Virtual Proofing to the Numbers.

During the initial industry panel a question was raised about how to deal with virtual proofing systems from multiple vendors. Large publishers obviously deal with many printing companies and those companies make use of many of the different virtual proofing systems now available on the market. While it did not seem appropriate to make a comment during the meeting, I will remind my readers that ProofPass.com allows verification of ANY virtual proofing system with centralization of the results on a ProofPass.com internet server.

Bill Pope (of FTA) then spoke about the 2008 Virtual Proofing Systems Certification Program. Bill made a great point that sound color management is the key to successful virtual proofing. While ISO specs inks that most printers are now using, good color management is required to simulate those colorants on a monitor. Bill also made a great point about dealing with proofing disappointment up front. While I loved the comment, I think we all know that customers want what they expect x not necessarily what they see….

A fairly technical overview of the certification program was then provided. I found two items of particular interest during this portion; 1. A shift is being made to utilization of Delta E2000 for virtual proofing verification (already supported in ProofPass.com); 2. One of Bill’s key steps to verify that nothing has been “fudged” by the vendor is almost identical to the ProofPass.com verification procedure.

Some other comments I picked up throughout the day:

Pressroom monitors will need to be replaced approximately every 18 months.
Office/prepress monitors should last about three years
About 90% of the Pantone spot colors can be achieved with a high degree of accuracy on monitors costing about $5,000.
Grey balance uniformity corner to corner on a monitor is key
Color clipping on monitors might be overstated – it is localized to fully saturated colors and just results in a slightly duller rendition of the color.

All in all, it was a day well spent with the publishing and agency side of our business.

#37: Monitoring Digital Presses

JimRaffel — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 14:19:29 +0000

At ColorMetrix we have some new and potential new customers who will be using our products (both ColorMetrix and ProofPass.com) to monitor and control digital presses like the HP Indigo, Xerox 8000, and NexPress. During our sales presentations most of these folks have expressed concern that the device is constantly self calibrating and correcting itself, so why would I need to do external process control?

My short answer: “Do you really want to let the fox watch the hen house?”

For the most part the internal controls on digital presses are built to keep the device in calibration. While these devices are different than conventional printing presses, they are not so different that we conventional printers do not understand them. There is a certain amount of variation that a conventional press self adjusts for like automatic register controls and the like. So, if we follow this augment to a logical conclusion that would mean process control would be useless on a conventional press as well. If you are reading this article I am fairly certain you do not believe that.

In general the act of process control requires the user to view the device (press in our case) as a black box. By measuring the resulting print the device produces, we are taking into account everything that happens in the device and the environment the device is in.

For example, several of these devices ‚Äúself-calibrate‚Äù by imaging on a drum or a belt between actual substrate impressions. It seems to me we have removed a pretty important piece of the quality puzzle from that equation. What if our substrate is stored in a warehouse with no air conditioning and our press is in a climate controlled room? A week or so ago it was almost 100 degrees with very high humidity in the mid-west. If we bring that paper from the warehouse into the production room and do not provide 24 hours for the paper to acclimate, do you think we would get the same print result as we would with paper that had been acclimated?

If you said NO, please call me for a free trial version of ColorMetrix or ProofPass.com so you can measure it yourself.

In conclusion, all the variables that contribute to a printed piece like; faulty RIPs, toner changes, device wear and tear, paper changes, etc are viewed by a process control system like ColorMetrix as a black box. Process control systems like ColorMetrix measure the finished piece in order to accomplish two goals:

Confirm that the finished print quality is within acceptable quality guidelines
Provide detailed enough information to track back the problem portion of the process when #1 above is not achieved

Overall, the goal of the manufactures self-calibration procedure to stability of the imaging process itself. The goal of a system like ColorMetrix is overall print and color quality of the printed piece you put in the hands of your customer.

#33: Thoughts on GRACoL 7 and Standards in General

JimRaffel — Thu, 04 May 2006 17:10:31 +0000

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday of this week I was in Louisville at the FFTA Annual Forum & INFO*FLEX exhibition. It was my first time attending this event and I was impressed. We even got to spend Tuesday evening at the Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom theme park in Louisville. I must say it was fun not having to wait in line for any of the rides (the park was closed to the public).

I was busy assisting one of our distributors (ColorManagement.com) with booth duty Sunday and Monday, but I did manage to attend several technical sessions focused on Color Management Tuesday. One of these sessions was about the still fairly new Printing Across Boarders (PAB) initiative. At the urging of Adam Dewitz over at Printmode.net I resumed receiving e-mail from the [pab] forum several weeks ago, so was interested to hear what was happening.

The primary focus of the presentation by Gerald Gerlach of Integrity Graphics was the GRACoL 7 (G7) methodology. It was during this presentation, and over the subsequent 24 hours that I began to solidify my current overall feelings about G7 and more importantly about graphic arts standards in general.

For my entire career in the graphic arts (more than 20 years now) I have nibbled at the edges of the standards community. I have always found it fascinating and have felt I had something to contribute. While my main role in life is now selling, I am still a pretty fair graphic arts technician when I need to be. I have not been more involved in the standards community for one reason; time. Those who carry the vast majority of the standards load in this industry do so as volunteers. While they may be on a company payroll somewhere I assure that only a very small percentage are paid to do only standards work.

These people give up evenings, weekends, and other valuable personal time so we can have graphic arts standards. I wish to say to all of you (and you know who you are) THANK YOU! So, perhaps instead of standing on the sidelines and criticizing (constructive or otherwise) all of us should be saying “how can we help you.”

While I do not completely agree with the G7 methodology, I do agree it is a step forward. I believe this because our competition in the Graphic Arts industry is not other printers. It is other communication mediums. Can you imagine television succeeding without any standards? Can you imagine the internet succeeding without any standards?

We as an industry need the ability to print an image consistently anywhere in the world. This is the true goal of G7 as far as I can tell. While I feel in the case of many printers this means you must “dumb down “ your press, the trade off for regional, national, or international print buyer makes this consequence of the methodology worth while. Any printer can still apply their “secret sauce” technology to specialty jobs. Just because you can print to G7 does not mean you must print to G7.

In conclusion, I want to ask the working members of BRIDGS, CGATS, FIRST, GRACoL, SNAP, & SWOP….How can I help?

On Standards, Dues, and Barriers to Entry

JimRaffel — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:21:13 +0000

I have been getting a good deal of pressure to post my position on GRACoL G7, and have been holding off for one very simple reason. My comments will “go against the grain” as one fellow blogger put it. As one who was not involved in the process I feel that it would be somewhat counterproductive to take such a position. Which brings me to my point, why was I not involved in the process?

As a life long (adult life) student of marketing, I am very familiar with the concept of barriers to entry, and try to set them very high for anyone who chooses to play in my game (color measurement software). I think that in the professional world where one company is trying to win and to a certain extent must do so at the expense of another barriers to entry are a great thing.

Where I feel barriers to entry have no place is in the creation of industry wide standards. Let me illustrate with two examples. ColorMetrix is a dues paying member of NEPS (excellent organization providing exceptional benefits to members). As a small company our dues are a very reasonable and affordable $295/year. Payment of these dues gets us several high quality research reports each year AND membership on any CGATS group we wish to participate in. CGATS by extension provides access to ISO. It seems to me even a start-up company can afford $295/year.

Idealliance on the other hand, appears to have a minimum annual dues cost of $2,500. For a small company like ours, folks, this is a barrier to entry. Remember, this is like admission to the club; it just gets you in the front door. You still need to pay for all your own drinks. Or in the case of GRACoL all your own travel, etc. to the pressruns and any meetings being held. It is also not a one time fee, but an annual fee. I can maintain my membership in NPES for almost 10 years for that same $2,500.

This is a bit of a rant (which I have tried not to do here), but I can’t help but wonder if this barrier to entry is intentional. If you have never commented on a JimRaffel.com post…this would be the one.

Golden Nugget #8…Specification, Guideline, or Process Capabilities?

JimRaffel — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 15:40:49 +0000

*** Introduction ***

If you noticed there was not Golden Nugget last week, it is because I was on vacation. Please remember you can always visit www.JimRaffel.com to review an archive of previous Golden Nuggets. There is still time to register for our User’s Group Conference coming up August 21-23 at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. You will need to call us directly at 262-820-1131 to make all arrangements at this late date.

*** Jim Raffel’s Week 8 Golden Nugget…Is it a Specification, a Guideline or a Process Capability? ***

We are often asked how to set both reference values (sometimes called target values, or gold standards), and the tolerance window associated with the reference values that have been set. I will start by saying my choice with all other factors being equal is to set both the reference and tolerance based upon process capabilities. Process capabilities are the most difficult of the three to explain so I will begin with the other two.

We define a specification as a reference value and tolerance range provided by the print buyer. For example, consumer product company K writes into the print contract that all special colors must be maintained within 2.5 Delta E of the L*a*b* values they provide for the color. If you are thinking a specification is something like SNAP, GRACoL, or SWOP (not a breakfast cereal by the way), please read on to see the way we define them.

We consider SNAP (Specifications for Newsprint Advertising Production), GRACoL (General Requirements for Applications in Commercial Offset Lithography), and SWOP (Specifications for Web Offset Publications) to be industry guidelines. While I am POSITIVE I will get several e-mails letting me know how wrong I am on this, let me explain. I look at it this way. Unless one of the above guidelines has been written into a contract, it is just that a guideline. Once a print buyer adds a clause to the contract that says print will conform to SWOP, it becomes a specification. What’s the difference? Well, you loose money and customers if you do not achieve specifications written into contracts. Guidelines on the other hand are a great aim point for jobs and customers who do not provide written specifications.

Process capabilities are a whole different ball game. I will not be able to do the topic justice here, but we are devoting almost 1/2 day at the User’s Group Conference in less than 2 weeks to this topic. Basically process capabilities are determined by operating under normal conditions for an extend period of time. Over this period of time samples are collected and measured. For example, in an ink jet proofing environment you would run for an entire month to collect samples on different shifts and under different temperature and humidity conditions. The samples are then analyzed using statistical methods to determine mean (average) L*a*b* values, and the accompanying standard deviation of the aforementioned values. Your reference (or target) is then set to the mean L*a*b* values, and the tolerance is set to a factor of the standard deviation. In ink jet proofing we have found a plus tolerance of three standard deviations to be achievable 99% of the time. When speaking of Delta E, the minus tolerance is not a factor. If your mean is Delta E over time is say 1.5, and you then run proofs with a mean Delta E of .1, they will be visually acceptable.

So, for my week 8 Golden Nugget, I have once again chosen to enter controversial waters. I look forward to the e-mails questioning my statements above and offering alternative views. Also, remember you can simply add comments to each golden nugget at www.JimRaffel,com, and all readers will seem them even if they are not included in a later golden nugget.