The Latest Developments in Monitor Soft Proofing

MONITOR SOFT proofing allows many benefits in terms of time and convenience. With the current economic challenges, all printers must look at ways to increase efficiencies. Soft proofing and online collaboration were obvious solutions even before the current financial meltdown, and now the case for soft proofing is even more compelling.

The aim in soft proofing is that the monitor provides an accurate prediction of the press output and different people can view the proof at different locations, yet see the same colors. Soft proofing can be for content and collaboration only, but most of the time we also want accurate color. A soft proofing "kit" consists of the following basic components:

• A good quality monitor, preferably with a hood
• A measuring instrument
• ICC color profiles
• A software solution such as ICS Remote Director or Kodak Matchprint Virtual

Selecting Your Monitor

The choice of monitor is important. All solutions today use only LCD flat panels, and most solutions are based on the Eizo Color–Edge (CG) series or Apple (HD or LED) displays. Other makes seen at recent trade shows, however, include NEC displays, the HP DreamColor and Quato monitors.

When choosing a display, uniformity from one side of the screen to the other is sometimes an issue, so a good software solution will take measurements from all over the screen before you start and then use that data to improve the display uniformity. The color gamut of the monitor needs to encompass most commonly used print gamuts. Images are displayed in a manner that simulates a press condition, thus the screen needs to accurately display all press colors. Usually, if you are buying a complete soft proofing solution, your monitor choice depends on the models supported by your chosen provider.

Color Management Basics

Color control for press, for ink-jet proofing and for soft proofing relies on a color management system that uses ICC profiles. ICC profiles are used by software products to create a number of common proofing and printing scenarios. (See Figure 2) An offset press result can be proofed on an ink-jet proofer to show the client a preview of the press job, by using the offset press profile and the ink-jet proofer profile.

In another scenario, the digital press output can be previewed by a remote customer on his or her desktop using the digital press profile and the client's monitor profile. To do that, an offset press job is previewed by a customer using the offset press profile and a monitor profile. We can also create color workflows with three profiles. If a job has a camera or other input profile, we can use that profile, followed by the digital press profile and then back to the customer to view on a monitor using his or her monitor profile.

We see that an image file can be processed through different ICC color profiles so that we can control and direct the color and always get the "correct" color. The "wrong" color is often created when we take the customer's job with their camera profile (or other input profile, such as sRGB) and display that directly on a monitor or send it directly to an ink-jet proofer. In that case the customer sees a very nice, bright, colorful image, and not what a digital or offset press will typically be able to print.

The correct rendition is created by using the camera (or other customer source profile) followed by the digital or offset press profile and then lastly we apply the monitor profile to view the image, or an ink-jet profile to proof the image. All RIPs and monitor soft proofing solutions will allow you to create color workflows using two or three ICC profiles based on the devices in your shop.

Online Collaboration

One of the most useful aspects of soft proofing is the ability to invite the client to view an online proof. You don't have to send the client a hard copy proof and they don't have to visit your shop for a press O.K. The client can approve the proof at a time that is convenient to them, and the printer and client do not even need to be online at the same time. After I prepared a proof in ICS Remote Director, I instructed the system to send my client an e-mail with a URL link and a message. Here is a real message that the system generates:

Abhay Sharma has invited you to view the following proof: Summer Course Catalog v1. Please log into Remote Director to begin viewing your proof, or click the following link: proof://tserver.icscolor.com/312909/.

The customer will have previously installed a copy of the free Remote Director client. (I, the printer, am paying for the solution.) On clicking the above link, the Remote Director client is launched and the proof becomes available for the customer's edits, approval and sign-off.

Color calibration of the monitor is a key consideration in soft proofing. All soft proofing systems instruct the user to hang a measuring instrument over the face of the display, and then a number of color patches are automatically displayed and measured. This is called color calibration and profiling. Without color calibration a customer can approve content, placement and text, and can annotate a proof. Only after a display has been calibrated and appropriate profiles applied, should the customer attempt to approve and edit color.

If you are approving color or are discussing color over the phone while you and your customer both look at a proof, then it is important that both of your screens are color calibrated. Green-red "traffic lights" (Figure 3) can be used to indicate who is viewing and collaborating on a soft proof and the status of their system. After a pre-set number of days the screen calibration will lapse and the user is asked to recalibrate his or her monitor. Any good soft proofing solution should constantly display the status of all parties in a collaborative session. This can avoid lengthy arguments and expensive mistakes.

Soft proofing systems make a note of everything; the system notes the profiles being used, who is viewing, and who has authorization to sign off. The system keeps track of the edits and also "freezes" the proof after final sign-off. Look for these sorts of features when you consider your purchase.

Commercial Solutions

Technically speaking you do not need to buy an expensive commercial soft proofing solution; Photoshop or Adobe Acrobat, in the hands of a skilled prepress operator, are valid soft proofing tools, but making sure that everybody has all the correct settings is difficult. Another reason to look at a commercial solution is for live, real-time collaboration.

There are a number of solutions to choose from. Before you go shopping it is useful to check the list of SWOP-certified systems at www.swop.org.

ICS Remote Director v3.6 is a mature product with the ability to deal with different paper stocks, thus it is possible to load a file that represents Sappi Opus Gloss or Sappi McCoy Gloss, etc. Remote Director is able to communicate via USB with the JUST Normlicht Color Communicator2 light booth to ensure that the luminance of the screen and the light booth match; this condition is needed when trying to achieve a screen-to-print match. And it improves consistency and repeatability when the program does this automatically rather than leaving it in the hands of a human operator. Remote Director is one of the best stand-alone soft proofing solutions today and has just released a slick Web-based version (remotedirector.net).

Kodak Matchprint Virtual is the offering from the Kodak stable. It runs only on the Mac OS due to a well known challenge with monitor profile lookup tables on the Windows platform. To run the soft proofing solution, you also require a framework of other Insite Portal products. If you are already a Kodak customer, there is no reason not to explore the extra cost of adding Matchprint Virtual.

DALiM DiALOGUE is a great workflow-based soft proofing solution. It is also a JDF-enabled production workflow system. Jobs from Acrobat can be packaged and uploaded to DiALOGUE via a JDF mime-package submission. The new "ES" interface provides a job-oriented version of the traditional DiALOGUE and keeps track of jobs via a built-in database. DALiM products can be integrated into third party asset management systems, such as Xinet Web–Native. This is the product to choose for workflow integration.

If you have Agfa or CGS Oris server workflows, it would make sense to use those engines to also process your images for soft proofing. For Agfa, the prepress operator creates the job ticket parameters in the Apogee Prepress client. Customers are then given a URL and are invited to upload their files via Apogee WebApproval. The files are processed by the underlying Apogee Prepress server and fed back to the customer to review the results. After approval, the files are marked as ready for production and continue on their prepress journey.

The CGS Oris system closely links the ability to produce hard and soft copy proofs using its well known ORIS Color Tuner engine. The CGS product is called ORIS Soft Proof or ORIS Color Tuner//Web. The Web GUI allows uploading and processing of jobs using pre-established queue parameters. After a job is processed in the queue it can be printed via Color Tuner using ORIS proofing paper or downloaded for soft proofing using a special ORIS plug-in for Acrobat. When used with ORIS proofing media, it is easy to get color ink-jet proofs and color-accurate displays of the same image.

Other notable offerings that should be considered are Serendipity and HELIOS, both of which were tested and verified at the June 2009 IPA Technical Conference (www.ipa.org).

Every printer must offer clients the ability to upload files via the Web and also to view a color-accurate soft proof of the job at the client's convenience. Soft proofing has caught on in Europe, with whole communities of users readily adopting this way of working. Many U.S. magazine publishers now only accept soft proofs. What are you waiting for? IPG

Abhay Sharma is a professor in the School of Graphic Communications Management at Ryerson University in Toronto. This article is based on a presentation entitled "ROI of Soft Proofing," which he gave last month at Graphics of the Americas in Miami. Contact him at: sharma@ryerson.ca