Recent developments suggest that
what was once the final bastion of craftsmanship, colour, is finally falling to
standardisation and automation.
The big suppliers are all upping the ante in colour control
and management whether it’s the press suppliers fitting closed loop controls
inside their presses, digital press vendors paying attention to the software
that drives their machines or the pre-press firms packaging up the colour bits
of the workflow as standalone modules. It all means that there is a huge amount
of light being shone onto a topic that was until recently still very much a
black art.
Last week I learnt something about the ISO 12647 colour
standard that turned the tables on my understanding of it, and made what I
thought was a very good thing into an excellent thing. I’d been led to believe
by an expert early on, when interest in the standard was modest, that it wasn’t
based on absolute colorimetric measurements, so was open to wide
interpretation. Last week a savvier specialist updated my understanding and
appreciation by informing me it is colorimetrically defined and therefore much
more of a true standard.
That was the equivalent of a high powered beam illuminating
something previously murky to me. Everything I’ve seen about the benefits of
defined and controlled colour suggest that the time, money and materials
savings for printers and buyers alike mean that there is a pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow.