Over the years, many media and manufacturers, such as printing technology, have increased the propaganda and reporting of Desktop color management. The purpose is to hope that companies can apply color management systems as soon as possible so that image replication can take the standardized and data-oriented path to improve quality and quality. effectiveness. However, many companies do not have much action at present, and the color management system has not been widely used. What is the reason for this? On the one hand, the current color management system is not satisfactory enough, and there is still a large gap between the actual production requirements. Second, China has not yet achieved the standards for printing processes and printed materials. There are many unstable factors in the process of dumping and it is difficult. Third, some business leaders have not paid enough attention to the color management system, and the intensity of the adoption is not great.
In the past years, the author has deepened his understanding of the process of helping some enterprises engage in color management. It is imperative to strengthen color management. It is the advancement of the desktop system that must be used to improve quality and efficiency. At present, many companies have introduced high-end equipment and advanced technology, but they lack color management and operations are not standardized. Therefore, they cannot play the advanced features of high-tech. This situation should be reversed and improved as soon as possible. Although there are still many difficulties in the color management system at present, this is an effective method that must be colored, and it is the fundamental guarantee for improving the quality and efficiency of image reproduction. Therefore, we must take a positive attitude, according to the actual conditions of our unit, adopt methods that are easy to use, difficult to implement, and implement in stages, and gradually improve. We will surely receive results. Do not trust anyone to try it out.
The following briefly introduces some of the practices and experiences of the author in practice for reference by comrades.
one. The optional color management system color management system (cms) refers to the software and hardware systems that can realize the correction of the equipment, establish the color description file, and realize the color conversion among multiple devices throughout the entire process flow, that is, the color management system. It is not just software. It is produced in a broad sense. In addition to its core software, it also includes:
1, support color management operating system ColorSync 2.0, 2.1;
2, equipment characteristics file (ProfIle);
3, support for color management application software, such as Photoshop5.0, FreeHand8.0, QuarkXress4.0, etc.;
4, all hardware devices in the process, such as scanners, computers, color monitors, digital printers, imagesetters and printing machines;
5, spectral measuring equipment (such as spectrophotometer, transparent, reflective densitometer, etc.). An effective color management system does not include a color management process plan in addition to the above tools.
The currently more mature color management systems are: Apple ColorSync 2.0, 2.1 (CMS), Kodak Precision CMS (Kcms), Agfa Fototune Flow, Linocolor 5.0, version 6.0. Although these different color management softwares have different focuses and roles, their basic goals are the same. Therefore, the color management system should be selected according to the hardware and software system of the unit.
The author applied the color management system designed by Linotype-Hell and Apple ColorSync 2.0 in junior high school. It includes the following three aspects:
1. Colorsync software, including Colorsync, ColorSync System Profile, ColorSync Prlfile. These files are part of the Apple operating system and are provided by Apple with the operating system.
2. Scanners, monitors, imagesetters, printers, and other device profiles. Linotype-Hell provides a complete set of software/hardware solutions to measure and calculate the profile of a single device, a total of three:
1) View Open ICC, used to generate a Profile file for the display, which contains a set of View Open ICC programs and a colorimeter to measure the screen color.
2) Scan Open ICC, for scanners to generate Profile files, contains a set of Scan Open ICC programs and three sets of major manufacturers Kodak, Fuji, Agfa's transmissive, reflective IT8 standard color code.
3) Print Open ICC, for a color printer or printer... file, which contains a Print Oppen ICC program and a spectrophotometer.
3. Implementation of color management application software Linocolor4.1,5.0,6.0 version.
Linocolor installed on the Macintosh, with the MacCTU card to control the Doha, S3400 scanner. CTU is an abbreviation for Color Transform Unit. It is a color space conversion card that rapidly converts color data in RGB, CMYK and CIE Lab color spaces. The CTU card is highly computationally intensive, enabling large computational operations of color conversions to be performed instantaneously and quickly scanning color separations (that is, converting scanned image data from one color space to another) to ensure high quality Separation. Mac CTU card has three functions:
1) Ensure that the scanned image data can be quickly changed to CIE Lab color mode for high-quality, fast color correction.
2) The CIE Lab image data data is converted to RGB data for true color display on the display in real time.
3) The final task of the CTU card is to convert the image data entering the CIE color space into four colors for printing CMYK, in order to ensure the high quality of color and the accuracy of color reproduction. This fully shows that the current development of new technologies has made great breakthroughs in the mutual conversion of color space and has taken a step toward WYSIWYG.
Through the application of the Linuo color management system in production, the color management system is actually a set of color data management based on computer software. It is a comprehensive job, with a unified color standard, application software and input, Output device support. The system's feature is based on the color perception CIE Lab data of the human eye and the Lab color space to represent the location of the color instead of changing the color model, ie, the original color before conversion is already within the device's color space range. If the color is not maintained, then if the original color before the conversion is outside the device's color space, replace it with the closest color that the device can print. The system can well perform color conversion between calibrated and characterized devices to achieve good color matching. At the same time, the company's scanning mode also uses Lab color space, which ensures that scan images rarely lose layer information due to different color gamut performance. In addition, the data conversion table between Lab and CMYK is provided, which makes it easier for the operator to adjust the color hierarchy.
Practice has proved that even the color management system can be well matched with the CMS color management system, thereby effectively improving the quality of image replication. (To be continued)