The Gas Company_The Half Bakery

Colour Separation

2011-12-12T16:12:00.000-08:00

This is a draft of the section for the main site which explains colour separation and why it is crucial to the print process.

An image that is printed in ink on a page is the result of a variety of processes, each handled by different people using different equipment all of which have the capacity to degrade or impove the image quality. To understand the importance of colour separation we will look at how and where it fits into the overall process.

Below is a brief description of the graphic arts workflow most commonly in use today.

RGB Image capture. The most common forms of image capture today are the digital camera and the desktop scanner. Both yield an RGB digital image file. In the settings of the camera or scanning software there are various options for how colour is handled.
Design and layout. The captured image is placed into a page using page layout software such as Adobe InDesign. In the settings of the page layout software there are various options for how colour is handled.
CMYK press. The page information including the captured image, text, and other design elements are sent to the software drivers of the printer which controls the actual mechanisms inside the print device which are responsible for applying the CMYK inks down onto the paper. Again, there are various options for how colour is handled.

In the above simplified description we start out with an image comprised of red, green and blue digital data. Keep in mind, this image does not exist in the real world, the RGB data file is only a series of numbers describing what the image looks like and can only be viewed using additional hardware. When the printer applies the inks to the paper it must do so using cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks.

Colour separation is the process of interpreting the original image capture's RGB image data to create CMYK image data required by the press. You can see how this would be a massively important component in the quality of a printed page. It is analogous to translating from one language to another. There are many different ways to interpret the original data and the results of the translation will have extremely different results depending on the quality of the translator.

Each of the three steps shown in the description above have the ability to perform the conversion from RGB to CMYK. Most camera and scanner software has the ability to save out as a CMYK file. The colour settings of the page layout software also has the ability to make the conversion, and it will do it by default. If the printer's driver receives RGB image data it will also convert it to CMYK by default.

With modern equipment, the image resulting from allowing the built in software to perform a default colour separation will yield a colour reproduction which will be pretty good so long as it is not compared side by side to a colour separation performed by a skilled colour separator.

A skilled colour separator will prefer to start with the raw image capture data from the camera or scanner image capture and will work to maintain the image information and the intent of the photographer.

Test for Square menu button icon header things

2011-12-06T17:17:00.000-08:00

A dozen ways to cook a GAS logo

2011-12-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

The following images are introductory headers for the main Gas Company Inc. site. Unfortunately I haven't gotten around to making the sections on the site, and in some cases I haven't really done anything but make these header images in the hopes that they would inspire me to do something on the subjects.

Sometimes I just make stuff like this when I'm looking for a way to procrastinate some other task and they have no real use at all.

See some of these examples below

Cloudbank: Photographs of clouds I haven't taken yet

Images for a website I hope to make some day that has pictures of clouds that I hope to take some day.

Take these Cloud/Aerial images for instance. I was on a kick for a while where I was going to photograph clouds... who doesn't love clouds?, bring in the clouds. I looked around for a domain name for my soon to be cloud site and found cloudbank.ca but for some unknown reason I didn't buy it. A few months later when I was back on the topic so I went to buy the domain. You guessed it... it was gone. In those months cloud computing had become the rage and all the cloud domain names were scooped up. Well that just killed the whole project for me, what a disappointment I was, how could I have made such an error. So I bought cloudlab.ca and a whole bunch of other cloud names. But I haven't done anything yet. But I will. Someday.

I made these Gas Digital headers one day. I was going through the Art Gallery of Winnipeg and there was a show on that had art made of discarded circuit boards. I shot them with my iPhone and made these on my laptop a bit later. Problem is that they don't really speak to the digital work that we do. They are kind of cool though so I buried them here in the Half Bakery.

These above images are some headers that I've made for our Gas Company Books section. We make a lot of books so I make a lot of these headers. To see our books section go back to the main Gas blog site gascompany.blogspot.com

This is an animated gif I made for as the main header for the Gas Company main blog site. I really think it's cool and will continue on this when time and interest permits. The file is only 37k and displays on mobile devices really well. The style works well with the Gas Company identity and it's a bit fresh, meaning that I've not seen it before, but I'm sure that it's been done, I just don't get out much

These are headers for the Delicious Inks section of the Gas Company Site. Delicious inks are specialty inks that I make in my basement ink lab at Gas Company. These inks are made from a variety of pigments used in various industries ranging from cosmetics to plastics manufacturing. Peter Welfare of Rycoline, The Printing Ink Company has been a great help in solving some of the problems I have occasionally encountered while making these inks.

This is as far as I've gotten with Astrolab. I know it's a pretty sorry excuse for a project but one day I'll get around to it. All I need to do is get a few little trinkets to allow me to bolt my camera to my Meade ETX 125 telescope. That's actually the easy part because then I have to go out to the middle of a field in the middle of the night and take some pictures of stars. I've done it a few times, it's not that exciting, but I'll get at it some day, promise.

I had this great idea where I was going to feature and discuss my favourite papers stocks. Do you know what?, that's a lot of work. Too much work to put it at the front of my priority list for spending my evenings and work hours on. I know it would be a great resource for clients and is very relevant to the work that Gas Company does, but there are just so many other things I'd rather do. I'll get back at it some day. Maybe I can delegate it out to someone that knows more about the subject than I do, like Guy Poulin from Type A Print. He knows all about papers and which ones are best for which jobs and how to balance the stock quality against the stock cost. It would be great if he wrote that section, then I would only have to take a few pictures and stick it up on the Gas Company site. I'll have to talk to him about that.

The above images are all of my Gas Company logo displayed on my iPhone screen, shot using the snowlab microscope. I like them, they have no good use, but they're cool looking so they've been stuck here in the Half Bakery.

This is the Gas logo all tweaked out in Illustrator using the 3D extrusion and pattern fill functions. I like it, I think it would look cool built in the real world out of laser cut and printed plexi with an illumination source. But I'll never do that, that would be a ton of work for minimal gain.... Hmmm, but you know what? I could UV print the floral pattern onto a sheet of transparent yellow plexi and then laser cut the Gas Company logo shape out. That would be a piece of cake. I'm going to try that.

I can't remember why I thought this would be so interesting

2011-12-05T21:05:00.000-08:00

I made this image one day for a large format printing experiment. In addition to cmyk, this process uses opaque white and metallic inks in a very unusual way.

In Flight Movies

2011-12-05T16:55:00.001-08:00

This is a slightly cool video of taking off from YYC. Zoom!

Start both videos at once if you have fast equipment and a big monitor, you can get it over with quicker that way... So you can say "why did I watch that?"

A slightly cool video of landing at Pearson.

Wet Books

2011-12-05T16:50:00.001-08:00

Books soaked in water for a long time and then dried. Try it!

The Gas Company Half bakery

2011-12-05T06:34:00.000-08:00

Here is a sample of a half baked idea for a military base. It's really just a doodle, but I thought it was funny.