Why office lights, big windows and red shirts can cause color-editing issues, and why someday color proofing may be all in your head.Graphics professionals everywhere want to reap the benefits of soft proofing. Instead of paying for shipping and waiting for a hard-copy proof, publishers can eyeball print designs and documents on a monitor.
However, doing it right is easier said than done—especially when it comes to proofing color images. While it may take time, effort and money to get up to speed on most aspects of soft proofing and color management, resourceful publishers can typically fix one obstacle pretty easily.
"Room lighting is the single most underestimated cause of color matching issues," said Chris Murphy, co-author of Real World Color Management, 2nd Edition. Fortunately, wrote Murphy, who is also founder of Color Remedies, a Boulder, Colo.-based training and consulting firm, it's not a monumental effort to get a room ready for color work.
David Q. McDowell, standards consultant, said, "The problem we've got, bottom line, is that the typical artist likes an environment which is almost anathema for doing a good job of judging color and color management."
A longtime Eastman Kodak Co. employee (retired) and now an NPES volunteer, McDowell currently chairs a number of groups and has edited more than a dozen graphic arts ISO standards.
Because graphic designers "have got all sorts of colored things around them and they wear bright clothing ... and they're sitting looking at a monitor and all the crap around them is reflected in the monitor," McDowell said, "They're their own worst enemy."
Standards
While a brightly lit office with age-dimmed fluorescent lights, halogen track lights, a multitude of distracting color objects and large outdoor windows producing tons of glare may represent the extreme in poor conditions for color proofing, two ISO standards may detail the ideal.
ISO 3664:2000 (Viewing conditions: Graphic technology and photography) and ISO 12646:2004 (Graphic technology: Displays for colour proofing: Characteristics and viewing conditions) describe a dim room, painted grey with no distracting items near the monitor. Those interviewed for this article referred to these recommended digital darkrooms as "not bad," "sterile" and "not a soul-sucking grey space."
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Murphy said, "ISO 3664 says that 32 lux or less is recommended, which is admittedly not much light, but it's not a cave. But it allows a maximum up to 64 lux. Again, it's not a lot of light, such as for ideal reading conditions, but it's not a darkroom."
Art Schmehling, Munsell technical manager for GretagMacbeth AG, said it's important to paint the walls gray for critical color work "because reflections from the walls or from the ambient environment will influence the look and feel of the sample you are evaluating. So that's also why, when you look at color companies in their controlled environments, they will actually have the individuals wearing lab coats that are white or grey."
"That's why the people making color judgments shouldn't be wearing an orange shirt or a bright red sweater and making a color call," Schmehling said.
While Schmehling said graphic artists could wear black shirts, he added, "You don't want it to be a black shirt with a big red dot in the center. It's funny, but I've seen it make a difference."
The Kiosk
Robert Pipe, worldwide director of monitor proofing for Kodak Polychrome Graphics, said controlling ambient light is so important that KPG used to offer an optional mini-viewing room/photo booth with the first version of its Matchprint Virtual Proofing System.
"This system was based on CRT monitors," Pipe said, "which, of course, were not as bright as LCDs, so to guarantee consistency from location to location we controlled the whole environment by providing a kiosk."
Pipe said it was easy to assemble, was eight feet square and had curtains on one of the four sides. When people wanted to view the monitor of the proofing system, they would come in and close the curtain behind themselves.
With the new version of the proofing system and advances in LCD technology, the kiosk has been left behind. Pipe said the LCD displays that his company recommends are two and a half to three times brighter than CRTs, so ambient light is not as big a problem as it used to be.
"When we first came out with our system, we looked at LCD, but it really wasn't a viable technology," Pipe said. "But now it absolutely is. Some of these monitors have fantastic uniformity and great color, and they are less affected by overall ambient conditions."
Next Page: The right bulbs make a difference.
There are measures publishers can take to control ambient light which are less drastic than installing a blackout kiosk.
Robert Chung is the Gravure Research Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Prior to that, he taught classes in color, color production and color management.
He said typical office room light is fine for color work, although reflections and glare on the screen should be minimized and a hood is very helpful. Chung said, "I have seen people just put cardboard around" the monitor.
He also suggested improving typical office lighting with 5000K bulbs, which are daylight-correlated and are akin to the graphic arts standard for viewing booths. He said he uses these type fluorescent bulbs in his lab.
Chung said to look for bulbs with a CRI (color rendering index) of 90 or better. CRI is the gauge of how accurate a bulb is in revealing colors. Outdoor light has a CRI of 100. General Electric Co., Sylvania and Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. all make 5000k bulbs.
As a matter of note, OSHA (the Occupational Safety & health Administration) offers ergonomics and lighting information to reduce glare and eye strain.
The Future
Someday soon, ambient light may not play a role in soft proofing at all, according Don Carli, president of Nima Hunter Inc., a communications industry marketing and consulting firm.
Carli is currently planning the new darkrooms that would replace the traditional photo labs at the New York City College of Technology of The City University of New York, where he is also a professor.
"If you are going to build a facility that's going to be there for 20-something years," Carli said, "you have to think ahead 20 years and say 'what is the darkroom of the future?' The darkroom of the future is effectively in your head."
Carli is talking about personal virtual displays. He said the technology, widely used by gamers and the military now, could someday eliminate the need to control ambient light and desktop monitors.
"The way they work is they actually paint on the back of your retina a scanned image. It's not an image that's formed outside your eye that goes through the lens and is then projected onto the back of your eye on the retina; literally it's a low-powered LED [red, green, blue] scanning device that directly images into your eye," Carli said.
When asked, Carli speculated the technology would be around not in five to ten years, but within a year. "Look at Microvision Inc.'s Web site," Carli said. "They're doing this for the military but they're rapidly moving toward commercial implementation of high definition, full-color imagery to the retina. Direct to retina."
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