What can go wrong without color management?

We’ve written a lot about why color management matters, but what about what goes wrong when you don’t use the right color management tool? How about if you don’t use a color management tool at all? It’s one thing to hear all the spooky stories about a printed brand logo being borderline unrecognizable, but it’s another thing when it happens to you and your artwork. The impacts of wrong colors can vary from barely noticeable to downright catastrophic. Below we will explore some examples of what can occur if you don’t apply ICC profiles correctly or use the right color manager tool.

Lackluster colors management can impact your work in the following ways:

• Your images might end up looking washed out when you convert using InDesign or Illustrator because the colors in your file cannot be reproduced by your printer.
• You edit your artwork on a screen that isn’t properly calibrated and your images are in fact much darker or lighter than you think.
• The colors you choose are out of the range your printer can produce, and editing software, such as Photoshop or InDesign, converts to ‘equivalents’ that look very different.
• You export your InDesign or Illustrator file without color converting, and your file remains tagged with your Adobe working space, which most probably won’t match what your printer uses and will cause discrepancies in print.
• Your Adobe color settings are set to default, and may not be optimal for the editing work you are doing.

But fear not! Follow a few key steps, and be sure you have the right tools in place, and you’ll be able to avoid, or altogether eliminate, these pesky problems. We recommend following these steps:

1. Calibrate your monitor frequently, and give some thought to the environment you are working in. Otherwise, you will not see accurate colors on your screen as you edit. Depending on the quality of your screen, the physical environment you are working in, and the time since your last calibration, you can experience big discrepancies in images and colors. Monitor color calibration is a often a big factor in inconsistent color. Learn more about out how to calibrate your monitor here.

2. Ensure that you are using ICC profiles correctly when working in InDesign and Photoshop. This means that you are working on a specified scale, so that Photoshop and InDesign know how to display your CMYK and RGB values. Without a color profile your screen will know that R 255 G0 B0 should be a full-on red, but as screens are made of different material, ‘full-on red’ will look very different across different monitors. Color profiles tell your monitor how to interpret this data. It is important to use a standardised working space across all editing programs, so that you can reuse the same artwork for different printers and keep everything consistent. Check out this post to see how to correctly incorporate color profiles into your workflow.

3. Use a color management service to convert from your general working color space to the specific profile that your printer is using. Without converting to your printer’s profile, you may be sending colors and images that are not within the printer’s reproducible range. Using a color management service, you can export to the printer profile and review the file prior to sending it off. You will see more consistent results compared to using editing software for this vital conversion. Check out xColor to learn more. xColor is cloud-based and can be used from anywhere in the world to ensure fast, accurate color conversion for a fraction of the cost of traditional color management tools or prepress services.

Following these three steps will result in vastly improved printing accuracy, and will help you preserve, and even enhance, your images throughout the editing process. When you can see accurate colors as you edit, and you correctly convert these colors to the output profile before sending artwork to print, you preserve your images AND your colors and ensure consistency across all material.

Here at xColor, color is our business. We’d love to hear from you in the comments section about your experience either struggling with, or mastering your own color workflow!

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