On Dec 10, 2003, at 3:05 AM, James Hendrickx wrote:
In our vision (we're magazine publishers) we
ideally want all our
images,
which come from more and more different digital sources, to be
delivered to
us in the largest possible colourspace, so when shot with a digital
camera
we want the camera's profile attached as a source profile, and we ask
our
lithographers to attach their scanners profile.
So long as the image needs no editing, I don't see a problem with this.
But how often does this occur? It makes more sense to me, that the
image would be converted into a well behaved editing space. By well
behaved I mean any of the non-device based spaces out there: sRGB,
ColorMatch RGB, Adobe RGB, ECI RGB, Pro Photo RGB, etc. These make good
editing spaces. Camera spaces and scanner spaces don't. They contain
non-linear regions, strongly lack in gray balance which is one of the
major advantages of RGB color correction over CMYK, and sometimes even
cross overs. This is not the case with editing spaces.
And this one conversion is not going to cause any noticable quality
loss. You want to avoid unnecessary conversions like going from RGB to
CMYK then back to RGB (and then back to CMYK) sort of thing. But one
RGB to RGB conversion to get your image into a well behaved editing
space has practical value and very little meaningful loss in quality.
If anything it will improve quality because it will be so much easier
to edit in, should editing be necessary.
I must add that this workflow is a pain when using
Quark Xpress 4 (and
we're
still a long way from a total switch to InDesign...)
As long as the RGB images are TIFF, QuarkXPress 4 will convert them
faithfully. Unfortunately there still is no solution outside of Adobe
applications themselves, for black point compensation. But other than
this, it's possible to get very good conversions in QuarkXPress 4.
Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
www.colorremedies.com/realworldcolor
---------------------------------------------------------
Co-author "Real World Color Management"
Published by PeachPit Press (ISBN 0-201-77340-6)