
2010/9/15 Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...>:
You say *that* and then you discuss someone else's color management incompetence? No way Jose :)
Let's try harder to avoid personal attacks. I think Krzysztof's question is perfectly legitimate.
What use would be for someone to have your monitor's profile? :)
The profile provides a mapping from the colors in document to the device-independent colors, which the printer will then be able to convert to its own device-specific print colors. What's wrong with that?
In reality press bureaus differ from each other. Some demand already separated files. Some want to do separation themselves. Some will even ask for source documents like Corel's CDRs or Adobe's AIs. Or Quark XPress documents, with fonts (I really mean it).
If anything, this rather strengthens Krzysztof's suggestion that ignorance and blindly following the hard-learned ways play a surprisingly large role in printers' practices and requirements.
The point of working with CMYK natively is that you
a) immediately see what your print is going to look like and
This is an illusion. Different printers will still print your CMYK file differently. Generic CMYK preview is only barely useful: it will warn you about some wildly out-of-gamut colors, but that's all. Other than that, producing a CMYK without a target profile is an exercise in futility - and it's doubly frustrating that so many print providers routinely expect you to do exactly this.
The world of printing is a mess. You can't change it. Saying "Uh. Oh. This is wrong, we won't do it." is not going to make users happy, because it won't help them to get their job done.
I fully agree that it is a mess. But I reject your attitude. On the contrary, saying loudly and clearly what's messy and wrong, and ahy, can't be but beneficial for everyone involved.