Matt Weichel, Senior Designer, Bradley Brown Design Group
What's new is old again: managing color in the age of digital photography.

There's no doubt that digital photography has made a wide-reaching and positive impact on the business of creating printed and electronic communications. Using digital photography can certainly save time and money, but at the same time there remain some "old fashioned" steps in the process—primarily found in the proofing stage—that should not be eliminated just because we're shooting digitally.

With traditional film-based photography, we would review film transparencies and have our printers create random proofs, which would afford us time to resolve any color management issues early on. This is the critical step that is often cut from the process now that most photography is shot digitally. The reasoning seems to be that the digital images we're seeing on-screen will be the same that we'll get on-press—but this is no more the case than it was when we shot on film.

The bottom line? We should accept digital photography as an asset to our efforts, but at the same time understand that digital has not replaced the process of color management in printed pieces:
  • Just as traditional film is processed to achieve the effects desired by the photographer, digital images also require the correction of shadows, mid-tones and highlights.
     
  • Our projects' schedules should always include the step of getting early random proofs from the printer so that photography can be reviewed, and then corrected and proofed again if necessary.
     
  • Retouching should never be performed purely based on what we see on-screen. Randoms from the printer provide the best possible depiction of what the final printed piece will look like.
Thanks for reading.

Matt Weichel
Senior Designer
Bradley Brown Design Group
Matt Weichel
Senior Designer
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Bradley Brown Design Group is a Pittsburgh-based graphic design firm specializing in strategic marketing programs in print and electronic communications.

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