Our headline story for the month.
NATURAL GRAPHICS Features
Digital Coordination / and it's frustrations..............
At Natural Graphics we are determined to move into the future and embrace digital technology. Once you decide to take it past the new toy stage you may soon realize that you have truly grabbed a tiger by the tail. Our long term vision is basically very simple or so we thought. We want to be able to be able to provide press ready material in digital format along with the necessary color proofs for color matching to the printer. We now realize that this is a very formidable task. We must learn to coordinate all the various components so that we can have consistent and predictable output. Following is a lesson that we learned the hard way. Our intent is to share it with the hope that for those that are embarking on a similar path may benefit or maybe just get a good laugh.
Presently we obtain the digital files for our images from film scans that either we do on our Nikon LS-2000 or that we acquire from commercial drum scans. We have really noticed tremendous inconsistencies in the drum scans that we procure from various sources so today we are looking at adding that capability in house just to get a consistent process and results. Oh, for those of you that think you can take a poor quality slide and have the scan have superior output to the original, no way ....garbage in garbage out. The fact is detail and sharpness are lost in the scanning process. To resurrect a poor image takes tons of work and time. Personally I'd rather spend my time shooting new images than trying to save bad ones in the computer. OK here's something that we worked out. Previously when we sent a slide out for scanning we sent the slide we wanted scanned. What we got back was the scanners rendition of our slide. Today we provide a test slide that is used solely for the purpose of understanding the scanners output. We created a test slide from known color sample combinations. Making sure that it was a good match to the sample or re-qualifing the color information so it was usable. We have naturally gone through the process of color correcting our monitor. We then compare the test scan results with the color proof we have using the Xrite color measuring equipment. We can than create a color profile for the scanner that gets us started on the earth plane prior to any work or adjustments we may do to the file.
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