Re: What notebook did you buy?

[David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Bruce,

There are many reasons why the color depth on your computer (high
color or better) should be quite adequate even for brochure creation.
For one thing, you cannot be sure in the first place that what you see
on the monitor will have much more than a passing resemblance to the
printed product...and even then the printing process used can vary the
color considerably.

(I should say that over the years I have done quite a bit of print
brokering and creating printed materials of all sorts.)

For one thing, the color model used by a PC is RGB, while the color
model used in four-color printing is CMYK. (I believe the Mac has a
mapped CMYK color space IIRC, but it is still displayed with three
colors per pixel).

For another, the monitor is transmissive color (you look through it)
while the printed page is reflective color, making the monitor look
much more color saturated than the equivalent printed page.

Professionals in pre-press often use calibrated monitors, proof
printers, and the entire production chain in the attempt to keep
things as close to the final output as possible. Thus, all you will
get on a laptop is at best an approximation of the final look.

When I do a color print job, if the colors matter I always get a
professional proof and often specify any special ink colors as well
using one of the color systems such as Pantone, Focaltone, etc.

For instance, corporate logos often specify the PMS (Pantone Matching
System) ink colors so there will be no doubt in preparing printed
literature.

The only way in which increasing color depth when working with color
materials is in photographs, to get an indication of more subtle
variations in shades of color. However, when preparing materials to be
printed, I usually use a hairline to indicate size and position of the
finished art in proper position and work on the image separately in a
graphics editor. I may also prepare an Acrobat file of the piece as
designed with the full-color photographs in place for the prepress
operators to get the idea of what I hope to see in the finished
output.

On a fast desktop with plenty of graphics power, if you do color
graphics work often then consider one of the workstation graphics
cards such as the ATI Fire GL or the nVidia Quadro 4000. These will
deliver color depth and precision much higher than 24-bit and not
dawdle doing it.

However, for the typical application, I will stick with my suggestion
that in many if not most cases you can do quite well by setting color
depth to 15 or 16 pixels...especially if you also play games since the
frame rate will be higher.

David

On 4/13/05, Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com> wrote:

> Whether it's a good option to reduce the color depth depends on what you
> are doing. For straight writing, it's a good idea, but less practical,
> of course, if you're doing a brochure that will be sent to the printer.

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