Printing can be a lip-curling experience. People think that when they press the print button a perfect print will come out, like using a copier. They would be wrong, however that assumption says a lot about the state of affairs in digital imaging, the disconnect between people and printing.
You could divvy up the giclée printing 'market' into two segments. There are 'Do-It-Yourselfers' and those who bring their pictures to digital printing companies. These two primary groups have many subgroups that range from naive to experienced. The experienced are excused from this article. They know that prepress work is a necessity if you are going to get out of the giclée printing process everything that it has to offer, which is a lot more that many people can see on their monitors. Which brings us back to WYSIWYG.
An experienced giclée prepress artist uses a monitor that shows as many colors as possible because a big part of WYSIWYG is being able to 'see'. Right? You can't work on something you can't see.
As technology has migrated LCD monitors have largely replaced traditional CRT monitors. At my fine-arts giclée printing company, Vashon Island Imaging, half the files we get for printing were put together by people working on LCD screens. The result is that highlights are usually blown out and dark tones all clogged up. It looks great on the monitor screen, but the print is ho hum. You'd be especially disappointed if you spent a small fortune on a printing set-up or at a printing shop for those ho hum results. Or, maybe you think the result is good? OK then. You qualify for the naive subgroup.
It's not difficult to move up from the naive subgroup to the experienced, even if you send out your work. There are two ways. The first one is trial-and-error. This is the favorite of the 'Do-It-Yourselfers' but it is the expensive way because you waste a lot of material before you nail it.
The incredible costs of trial & error and do-it-yourself actually account for a good part of our business at Vashon Island Imaging. Folks come for our giclée prepress seminars to learn how to make their pictures print better, or they leave them in our capable hands to prepress and print for them.
We even have some customers for whom we prepress image files being sent to other printing companies, some of them overseas. We can do that because no matter the printing process, every picture needs to be prepressed and all printing processes share certain basic needs. It is those basic needs that you can learn even if you never set hands on a printing machine. Everything about making giclée art is in my book Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée (ISBN 9780-9865-75112, 272 pages, 477 pictures, www.gicleeprepress.com).
There's much more to today's WYSIWYG conundrum than just LCD monitors, although they are a major culprit. As I explain in the book and in a previous blog, sometimes you need to start with the 'finish'. What is the output going to be? Paper? Canvas? Video projector? Each of those groups has many subgroups and each one will make your picture look different. Which is better is up to you. Helping you get the best possible results on any of them is what the book and this blog are all about.
Profiling is the second biggest problem we run into at Vashon Island Imaging. Files come in with no profiles or profiles based on the limited gamuts of video and the web. Profiles are the subject of a blog all by themselves and as vastly misunderstood as giclée prepress. I tell my seminar followers that working without profiles is like having Stevie Wonder do your printing. However, if hit or miss is your style, go for it. Some great art has been made by hackers. Many want control, however, and that comes with a knowledge of how photography and printing works. You know, the fundamentals. If you didn't want control of your giclée printing you probably wouldn't be reading this.
It's one thing to know all about tools and what they do. It is another thing to know what you need to build with them. For example, a house needs a foundation. The foundation could be made of rocks, concrete, steel, or possibly wood. The type of foundation dictates the tools necessary. And so it goes with giclée printing (any printing and even audiovisual output). Each individual type of output requires the basic picture file to be adjusted to its own dynamic tone range. Another way to look at it is that every device can make a certain number of colors, some more than others. The number of colors in your original picture file must be made to fit into the color range of the output device. But it is more than just the number of colors.
The type of colors is just as important. Here there are two primary groups, RGB and CMYK. There are also two ways to see those colors, from light emitted by a monitor or by light reflected off a print. Already that's a lot of combination. But it gets worse... different kinds of art paper print colors differently, just as different kinds of TVs and monitors show colors differently. Now if you can still find WYSIWYG in all that, you show me. That's why there's the disconnect between people and printing.
People think that WYSIWYG exists throughout the giclée printing process when actually it more or less stops for most people when they press the save button on their PhotoShop® master. However, the experienced know that fine printing is a two-step process. The first step is perfecting the image and making the digital master of the picture. The second step is prepress work to adjust the picture for specific kinds of output... the giclée printing machine, the media, and even the finishing and display characteristics of the picture must be considered.
I said above that you can't work on something you can't see. Or can you?
'There's more to it than meets the eye', an old saying goes, and as it turns out there's a lot you can learn.
Just as pilots learn to fly by instruments, you can learn how to 'print by numbers'. Well, sort of. Enough to take the curl out of your lips by avoiding the most common printing pitfalls. By knowing where the pitfalls lie, you can prepress your files so that they will look considerably better in any printing process or AV display.
'Knowledge is power', another saying goes. If you are 'in the know' then you can change the emphasis in WYSIWYG so that the phrase is interpreted as, 'what YOU see is what YOU get'. Knowledge brings control... and control puts the 'You' back in WYSIWYG.
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