Strangely, here is a subject that I actually find exciting. It is fascinating to me how well color goes through the prepress and printing process when you understand and strictly adhere to an established process such as SWOP, and how poorly it goes when you do not.
BTW, GRACoL was intended to be pronounced "grackle," as in, "SNAP, GRACoL & SWOP," like the old Rice Crispies elves.
Midtone Gain, Solid Ink Density, Gray Balance. This makes some people's eyes glaze over, but I love it. I have to say that it is entirely possible to get good results off press without any consideration or adherence to these protocols. What is not possible without understanding and adhering to these protocols is consistently getting good results. As Lt. Colonel Jeff Cooper opined, "Marksmanship is not what you did once, but what you can do can do every time, upon demand." And that is what separates a good Prepress Shop or Printer from all the rest: what you can do every time, upon demand. You might get away with sloppy proofing or pressmanship some or even most of the time, but if you aren't keeping a sharp eye on Midtone Gain, Solid Ink Density, and Gray Balance, it will bite you. Usually it will bite you at a critical time.
Take a look at this file. It is a 50 K square on a background of 50 Cyan, 40 Magenta, and 40 Yellow. (Actually, I had to convert this one to RGB for it to display on Blogger, but you can create the same thing in Photoshop to print it CMYK) It should look like one flat neutral gray patch. If you can see the difference on screen, your screen is not ideally balanced, which is not really too big of a deal. You're not going to get reliable CMYK color from your monitor anyway. If you can see the difference in your color proof or press sheet however, you have a problem. You're not printing to specs and that is going to show at an inopportune time. So many jobs will sail through seemingly without a hitch, then suddenly the pressmen can't match the proof. And it's for the biggest client. And they're going to be here to sign off on the press run. The pressmen point fingers at prepress; prepress point at the press.
So who is right? Fortunately that is a really easy question to answer: Whoever can show that their Solid Ink Densities and Midtone Dot Gain are where they are supposed to be. If neither the proof nor the press have these numbers written down, then they're probably both wrong. Inkjet proof or not, you need to be able to solidly quantify what each of these things reads, with a densitometer. LAB values and ∆E just doesn't cut it. If you're only 2.0 ∆E on a 4C halftone or an image with lots of gray in the subject, and it's casting pink , what do you add? ∆? or E? L, A, or B? You can't add any of those things. The problem is with your Solid Ink Density, or your Midtone Dotgain, or both, and ∆E doesn't address that at all.
Here's the thing though: all the not-so-critical jobs were probably wrong too, but you weren't looking at them that critically. You could've done better, you just weren't. You could have provided your customer with top shelf quality, you just didn't. Now that it means something, the slop that was in the system all along is looking really sloppy.
Conventional wisdom indicates that you cannot compare Solid Ink Densities on inkjet proofs, and you'll just have to rely on LAB readings. I don't know about other systems, but I do know you can get your SIDs where you want them with the GMG ColorProof software, because I have done it. It's not that easy, but it is possible. Other inkjet proofing solutions mostly rely on standard ICC profiles, which may not allow you to monkey with the profiles like that. If that's the case I'd use a different proofing solution.
I wish I had the capability at home to produce SWOP quality proofs. I would like to set myself up with an Epson 4880 and GMG ColorProof, but the Lord has not provided that so far.
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