In article , Tacit
wrote:
In , Stephen
Edwards wrote:
First off, I’d lose the TIFF format altogether, and save the file out as an Encapsulated PostScript. I’ve worked in the print industry for nearly nine years, and me and my coworkers learned early on that TIFF files were strictly taboo[0]. They almost never match from monitor to press.
Then something is seriously, seriously wrong with your workflow, or you have the Quark Color Management XTension turned on.
*snicker* Oh, yeah, we sure had fun with that one early on. 🙂
Yes, that was one of our original issues with TIFF vs. EPS, but there’s a bit more to it than that.
A CMYK TIFF and a CMYK EPS will print to an imagesetter or platesetter exactly the same way, provideds you are not using something like a color
Well, that all depends on what you’re doing.
management system in Quark or (God forbid!) PageMauler. You can verify this yourself in about five minutes with a sheet of film and a densitometer.
Like I said, it depends upon what you’re doing. Unlike TIFF, EPS files are already saved out in separate plates, so you don’t have to rely upon someone else’s software to separate the colors for you properly (and call me kooky, but I’ve learned to trust Photoshop implicitly over the years, as it’s never failed me… not once). Plus, when you get into presses that do more than 4-color processes, things get really hairy, and EPS files are much more managable.
For one, TIFF files store only bitmap data, and not much else. The vector-based mapping in TIFFs is not as clean as it is with EPS files. Also with EPS files, you can store color management data, and transfer curves and ruling as well for that matter. When you get to the high-end presses, these things tend to matter more (depending upon the project in question, of course).
Then there’s another slew of issues that we had with Quark (we were using version 3.32 when I worked at a shop that did both the prepress and press work). For one, sometimes QuarkXPress wouldn’t properly display TIFF images in their boxes. If the box had a default color of white, most of the time it was okay, but if any of them were set to ‘none’, the image was often blacked, or garbled. When you have close to one hundred pages, this becomes a real problem, especially when you have several people working alongside you who refuse to leave default settings alone.
Another problem we had with TIFFs under QuarkXPress is that the previews tended to contain more raster data, and therefore, made Quark documents that much bigger. It wasn’t unusual to have a QuarkXPress file that came close to 200MB in size in some cases when we orignally used the TIFF format.
In my fourteen years’ experience in high-end professional prepress, it has been my observation that TIFF is one of the preferred formats for high-end image output. No color shift is inherent in a TIFF; the file
I have to disagree with this. IME, color shift is inherent with any screen display format (which is what TIFF is, essentially), especially if the file is an RGB file. From what I’ve seen, the primary reason why is because of the dreaded, "CMYK gamut". Think of the color range of RGB as a square. Think of the color ranges of a CYMK file as a circle which will fit into that square.
Where the edge of the circle cannot reach the edge of the square, those are the colors that CMYK cannot achieve the way an RGB mode image can.
Now, you can store your TIFF images in CMYK format, yes, but in doing that, you lose color information, so I personally wouldn’t recommend it.
format permits straight CMYK, and unless you have some piece of software
Many image formats permit straight CYMK. That doesn’t make them ideal for printing.
deliberately mangling it, what you get on output will precisely match what is in the original TIFF, and will precisely match the same image output as an EPS.
I can’t imagine why you would believe otherwise, except to assume that
I believe otherwise, because experience has taught me otherwise. But hey, if TIFFs work for you, don’t let me rain on your picnic. 😉
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that TIFF is unusable, or useless. In fact, I prefer TIFF for outputting proofs to dyesub printers, and such. I just don’t think it’s a practical format to run to presses, that’s all.
there’s something wrong in the way your firm handles either color management or output, and you have erroneously concluded that the problem is the TIFF format. I would urge you to try an experiment or two and verify this for yourself.
Alas, my friend, I have, and myself and my coworkers at that time had determined that EPS files were the optimum format to use.
Again, I must stress, this all comes down to three different factors:
1.) The nature of your services and your projects.
2.) The number of people you’re working with.
3.) The range of presses which you are outputting to.
Perhaps there should be a alt.image-format.advocacy newsgroup? 😀
In conclusion, I just think that EPS files make for less problems and snags, but again, this is really just my personal opinion.
Wow. It’s nice to talk to someone who actually knows something about the print industry. It seems our trade is unusually arcane, doesn’t it.? —
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