Do you honor or ignore embedded profiles?

[Gregg]

I did some searching before creating this post and wasn't able to find many threads. I work at a book publisher and we have a sister company in London. We do printing all over the globe (primarily Asia, but also US, UK, Italy, Mexico). We, my company and our sister company, are trying to create a group wide CMYK working space and tag all of our files with this. This way when we share files we are not guessing at what conditions the original creator was viewing their files. The tricky part is that our file are sent to different printers all the time so it's hard to come up with a profile that would be best for overall purposes. I began to contact most of my US printers to see what they prefer and the most common response I received was that they ignore or prefer not to have embedded profiles. I was somewhat surprised to hear this but after speaking with them it made more sense, as they explained most clients do not understand color management, or even know what a profile actually does.

How about you? Is your shop linear or profile based? Do you prefer to receive tagged files?

Also, was looking for feedback on using CM is InDesign. We are about to make the switch from Quark to ID and are looking into using CM throughout CS.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Gregg

[TimS]

Ignore. You should restart this as a poll, I would be curious to see the results.

[colorblind]

Most will ignore even though preserving will not affect the file's CMYK value and will help display consistent color (assuming the sender and the receiver have properly calibrated monitors). I think the real debate is about converting CMYK values of a certain color space profile into another CMYK profile (press profile) to preserve color appearance.

[Seagull]

In my shop we have calibrated ICC profiles for each press, we send all jobs using these profiles, this is the color-space of our presses and what they can replicate, that is what color-management is in printing. I always chose to re-save scans with no profiles attached and let the numbers do the talking. If the color on my proof cannot be closely matched on press then we have a problem somewhere, usually press side. The problem is, is that color-management is not used by everyone, calibrating your clients monitors is their IT guys job, Good luck. Your clients would need on-site training from your company to be successful even a little bit. So "Ignore" or not sometimes your hands are tied, if you don't know what is going to happen at the other end, pray, but if you have some control in house then you have a great chance of success.

[Techboy]

Gregg, I'm in the same situation as you. Our vendors are essentially giving us the same responses. Most printers don't trust clients to setup profiles correctly even if they do provide ICC profile for monitor calibration (which is what I have been receiving ICC profiles). That said, having calibrated monitors doesn't mean you'll have calibrated proofing outputs from your printer.

I think a bigger problem is printers rather not waste time helping you setup a working color management because theirs' is already working. Besides, they can always charge you for the extra "prep" work.

I have posted previously that our art dept tends to send things out in RGB with Adobe 1998 profile. They believe our printers will do a better job at converting to CMYK than if we do it in-house with a generic CMYK profile. Which is true, because ultimately our job has to run on their press.

Regardless what profiles we sent, our vendors will simply ignore our embedded profiles and overwrite it with their own. I do prefer sending out generic CMYK images than leaving it in RGB and give printers a chance to charge us for extra "prep" work.

[zox]

Printer should not charge you an extra money since basically you are doing them a favor by not converting to CMYK, especially if your RGB images are properly tagged.

CM or not CM depends on too many factors.
It can work but it might not work, YMMV.

People in our industry are pretty much still ignorant about proper CM and it will take big vendors push to make CM "one button press" that works.

If you are familiar with CM and you think you can properly implement it, do a test with your printer.
Problem is if your printer is not up to date (which is most) and they have no experience and/or tools to deal with it.
In such case find printer that can and do a test.

[kovachjon]

We mostly convert files to our profiles - we use Adobe 98 and 3M Matchprint to run everything off our HP 5500s. After testing, these are the profiles that generate the biggest color gamut for us.
If files come in untagged, we convert. If they come in with profiles on, we usually keep them as is... however there are some customers that we have custom workflows for. We can't keep anything standard, usually.
Jon

[Techboy]

Originally Posted by zox

Printer should not charge you an extra money since basically you are doing them a favor by not converting to CMYK, especially if your RGB images are properly tagged.

This is where things aren't so black and white... this is a gray matter area where no one seems to have a solid answer on either end... at least for us here.

Every printer's prepress guidelines we have received so far and I personally reviewed them all... ALL stated they like/prefer receiving CMYK image files and not RGB. Preferences aside, it appears they will accept files in any format as long as they get the job. Go figure, money talks.

So CM or not, right now preaching what is right and gold generally falls into a black hole.

[JRomano]

Why IGNORE !

Use it to soft proof through your CMYK profile, if it looks different when you assign YOUR profile you need to CONVERT to your profile.

>>I think a bigger problem is printers rather not waste time helping you setup a working color management because theirs' is already working. Besides, they can always charge you for the extra "prep" work.

Not a true statment, most good printers will help you set up eveything
and show you how to use it....we do it all the time !

I send out my profiles to anyone who needs them, I will send instructions on how to set up photoshop and even go as far as calibrating thier monitors if its a good customer.


Also Id rather make things look good the first time rather than charge a customer for another round of proofs for not touching thier files in the first place.

I soft proof everything and then decide if I need to convert or leave alone.
If I get files without profiles I will most likely assign something that looks good and then convert to my profiles. I want ALL of my files to have the same separation settings going to press.

Just my $.02

John R

[colorblind]

Originally Posted by JRomano

I soft proof everything and then decide if I need to convert or leave alone.
If I get files without profiles I will most likely assign something that looks good and then convert to my profiles. I want ALL of my files to have the same separation settings going to press.

Well, this makes sense if your customer is aware that whatever files not tagged to your profile will get converted, changing the CMYK values. Communication is the key here. But most people would rather not commit to change CMYK values of files submitted to them so they can protect themselves by saying "this is what you gave me" in case customer is not happy about final proof/printed color.