Friday, October 1, 2010

Interesting color problems...

Its been a while since I posted here - mostly because not much is happening right now business-wise in the industry (I think people are biding their time waiting to see what happens in the economy).

At any rate here's an interesting color story....

A few months back I get a call from a customer - its the operations folks down on the shop floor.  They tell me that the RIP is failing to properly process the files because there are "ghosting" and "shadows" around the fine strokes on small black text.  They say this is an on-going problem and its happened before and could I help them fix the RIP...

Only one problem with this - we didn't sell them any RIPs...

So I get on the phone and talk to the operator - always a challenge for a variety of politically incorrect reasons.  Eventually I tease out of her the specifics - fine black lines in images have halos of C, M and Y around them - basically as reported.  So I ask - is this on all the work on some of the work - only on one type of job on one kind of logo is the reply.

So I stop and think for a minute: A) they are not our RIPs, B) we have a process that creates image content, C) there is a workflow to prevent CMYK black.  This particular system has been running live for at least a decade in one form or another so I am not about to dive in and start changing any settings without some very careful thought.

The RIPs in this configuration pass CMYK as-is, i.e., don't remove CMYK black, because sometimes there is need for it.  So turning it off in the RIP will invite untold production disaster fifty midnights from now.  Plus its been set this way for a decade and so far this is the only problem we have been called on.  My buddy checks the RIP logs and we see no signs of tom-foolery with settings, etc.

Next I get hold of a logo that's causing the problems in source form, i.e., a PDF.  Sure enough there's CMYK-black tiny text (six point).  So now we've tracked down why the press is doing what it does.

So I call the vendor of the press and explain to the tech how its not really their issue (save for any alignment issues they may have on their own).  He doesn't know enough about us to understand we didn't sell the RIP so he's been thrashing for a day or two trying to fix something that's not really broken.

Since the actual logo creation processes is out of our hands I talk to the big boss and explain what's wrong.

Fast forward to today...

I get an email from the press vendor explaining a service call for the exact same issue has come up.

This time we can save an airfare and a few days on site diagnosing nothing because the new guy from the press vendor is on the ball. 

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