15. Color Management in QuarkXPress: Incremental Improvements

In print production, QuarkXPress is still very much the 800-pound gorilla, so we can’t ignore it, but we find a certain irony in the fact that despite being one of the first applications to offer color-management capabilities way back in the early 1990s, those capabilities have improved surprisingly little in the intervening decade. In this chapter, we cover QuarkXPress 3.32r5 through QuarkXPress 6 because many sites still use older versions of it, and the third-party solutions we discuss work with all three versions.

QuarkXPress 3 effectively lacks built-in color management, and the QuarkXPress 4 CMS lies somewhere between almost-usable and totally maddening. QuarkXPress 5 offers color-management capabilities that are generally useful, with some annoying limitations. The color management capabilities in QuarkXPress 6.1 are essentially unchanged, though some particularly annoying bugs have been fixed. Nevertheless, we have effective solutions for all three versions.

So fear not. In this chapter we’ll look at solutions for the most common QuarkXPress output workflows: CMYK output destinations, RGB output destinations, the Web, proofing, and miscellaneous—grayscale and duo-tone images, spot colors, and spot-to-process, simulating spot colors with RGB or CMYK builds.

Turning It Off

The simplest way of doing something is usually the safest, and often the most efficient. If you use early-binding workflows, the safe and simple way to handle color management in QuarkXPress is to turn it off.

All the elements you import into your QuarkXPress documents—images, vector art, etc.—must be “print-ready” and already converted to final output CMYK. You need to do this anyway with grayscale, duotone, tri-tone, and quadtone images, all of which must be targeted specifically for the output method in question before you place them into QuarkXPress.

Any CMYK colors specified in the Color palette must also be output-ready, because their actual color appearance depends on the output device—a CMYK build won’t look the same on newsprint as it will in a magazine. Consider creating your CMYK builds in an application such as Photoshop or Illustrator, then simply using the same numbers in QuarkXPress, and not worrying about display discrepancies—they’ll print the same even if they look different.

Note that with color management turned off in QuarkXPress, you can’t use RGB images and native elements—because while they’ll often look OK onscreen, they’ll either separate poorly or wind up entirely on the black plate. CMYK images, on the other hand, print according to the numbers in the file, but often look like neon onscreen.

Turn Off QuarkXPress 3 CMS (Mac OS Only)

QuarkXPress 3.3.2r5, the most recent and last version of QuarkXPress 3, included a color management system called “EFIColor.” It predated the ICC profile format, so it used its own proprietary profiles, never worked well, and is best avoided—try finding software for making EFIColor profiles if you enjoy exercises in futility.

Turning color management off is the only practical solution in QuarkXPress 3, unless you resort to a third-party XTension such as Compass Pro XT (which we discuss later in this chapter). To do so, you need to delete three components on the Macintosh: the EFIColor system extension, the EFIColor folder, and the EFIColor XTension.

Turn Off QuarkXPress 4, 5 and 6 CMS

The first method is to close all documents, then go to the Edit:Preferences: Color Management Preferences window and uncheck “Color Management Active.” It’s very important that you do this while all documents are closed, otherwise you only turn off color management for the foreground document.

The absolute, sure-fire method of disabling color management in QuarkXPress 4 and 5 is to physically remove the Quark CMS XTension from the XTensions folder, found inside the QuarkXPress application folder.

Built-in Color Management

We’ve already told you the bad news about EFIColor, the built-in CMS in QuarkXPress 3 for Macintosh—get rid of it before it hurts you. The Windows version has no built-in color management whatsoever. Essentially, there’s no built-in color management in QuarkXPress 3.32 on either platform. In a way, this isn’t a bad thing because you can be certain QuarkXPress 3.32 will send the RGB or CMYK values in the document as is, without massaging the data first.

QuarkXPress 4

QuarkXPress 4 includes the Quark CMS XTension, which brings a certain level of ICC support. It works in conjunction with ColorSync on Mac OS, and ICM 2 on Windows 98 and higher.

You need to be either brave or nuts before deciding to use the Quark CMS in this version of QuarkXPress. In theory, it will color manage any RGB or CMYK TIFF and native colors from the Color palette, and let you convert them to a CMYK or Hexachrome destination (with no control over rendering intents). It sounds limited, and it is, but the limitations aren’t the issue. The real problem is that QuarkXPress 4.11 has enough bugs to qualify as a lifetime employment program for the Orkin man. QuarkXPress 4.04 and 4.1 don’t have as many problems, but they still have enough to be considered dangerous.

Here’s a short laundry list of QuarkXPress 4.11 CMS problems:

• QuarkXPress 4 sees, and claims to use, embedded profiles in RGB and CMYK images, but it doesn’t actually use them. Instead, it uses the Default Source Profiles. To make matters a little more complex, when you change the Default Source Profile, imported images with embedded profiles (which QuarkXPress ignores) continue to use the Default Source Profile that was in effect at the time they were placed as their source profile. Untagged images, however, will use the new Default Source Profile.

• Separations from RGB to CMYK produce different results depending on whether the source profile is embedded, or manually selected in the Profile Information palette.

• In the Print dialog box, in the Profiles tab, the “Composite Simulates Separation” option implies that QuarkXPress can cross-render final CMYK to a composite printer for proofing. It can’t. Whether the option is checked or not, it makes no difference in output.

A cautious person might be able to incorporate all of the limitations and bugs into an effective workflow using the Quark CMS, but we’re hard-pressed to think of any real benefits to doing so, considering the potential for disasters. If you need built-in color management for specific features such as soft proofing, we recommend reading the next sections on QuarkXPress 5 and 6’s CMS, and the coverage of InDesign CS in Chapter 12, The Adobe Common Color Architecture, then upgrading to either of those packages.

QuarkXPress 5

The Quark CMS in QuarkXPress 5 is, according to Chris, “nearly usable.” It doesn’t support color management of EPS, unlike InDesign CS; however like InDesign CS it also doesn’t color manage grayscale files. These are limitations of which you need to be aware.

If you frequently use EPS or grayscale images, you can’t really use the “Composite Simulates Separation” feature for proofing, because some content proofs correctly while other content is left untouched by QuarkXPress. And while QuarkXPress 5 supports RGB output device profiles in the Composite Output pop-up menu, QuarkXPress disables “Composite Simulates Separation” when one is selected. Therefore, built-in proofing is only available for CMYK Composite devices. For such workflows, a solution that effectively handles all content is needed—such as Compass Pro XT, discussed in this chapter, or some of the solutions we discuss in Chapter 17, Automation & Scripting.

The biggest question mark with the version 5 Quark CMS is in regards to RGB-to-CMYK conversions. Certain combinations of profiles produce discrepancies of 5%-10% compared to using the same profiles, CMMs, and other settings in Photoshop. In our experiments, the most likely suspect to trigger this problem is when the RGB image uses a wide gamut RGB profile—such as Wide Gamut RGB, ProPhoto RGB, and some scanner profiles—as the source profile.

Because of the uncertainty that surrounds this particular issue, we can’t recommend using the Quark CMS for RGB-based workflows. But at the same time, we can’t not recommend using it at all. The following features all appear to work reliably:

• Soft proofing: The Quark CMS properly displays RGB and CMYK images, including the ability to simulate the output from the composite or separation printer onscreen.

• Hard proofing: The Quark CMS “Composite Simulates Separations” feature lets you produce proofs on a composite PostScript printer, but only using relative colorimetric rendering. The option isn’t available for non-PostScript printers.

However, a major practical problem is that by default placed CMYK images are set to no color management to CMYK destinations. That includes proofing. Unless you change this setting prior to image placement in preferences, or when importing the image, CMYK images are not color managed. After image placement the only option is to check “Color Manage to CMYK Destinations” in the Profile Information palette for each image. This is very tedious and probably impractical for many workflows unless the job was originally created with color management for CMYK content in mind.

• CMYK-to-CMYK conversions: used for repurposing images for output processes other than the ones for which they were originally separated.

• RGB-to-RGB conversions: for RGB workflows with RGB source images outputting to RGB destinations. CMYK-to-RGB is also supported.

• Embedded Profiles: QuarkXPress 5 both recognizes and uses embedded profiles in TIFF only. Embedded profiles in other formats are ignored, which is obviously potentially dangerous. Once ignored the Default profiles apply instead.

The most useful feature by far is soft proofing. With the caveat that only TIFF, JPEG, PICT, and native colors used in the Color palette are color managed, it can be helpful to many workflows. No third-party product is capable of bringing customizable soft proofing to QuarkXPress; however Enhance Preview XT does produce a close SWOP simulation.

QuarkXPress 6

The QuarkCMS in QuarkXPress 6 has essentially the same limitations and bugs as QuarkXPress 5. QuarkXPress 6.1 fixes at least one problem. Profiles are now found in all of the locations in which profiles can be stored on Mac OS X, including subfolders, and it correctly resolves aliases of profiles. One other problem that seems to be fixed is that RGB-to-CMYK conversions now match those of Adobe applications, minus the effect of Black Point Compensation, with all the profiles we’ve tested.

QuarkCMS continues to be relatively simple to use if your requirements are simple because by default it treats untagged and tagged CMYK the same. Neither are color managed. It’s also easy to configure for soft proofing only, if you have a CMYK workflow and that’s all you care about.

But QuarkXPress hasn’t lost its ability to annoy the color management aficionado either. Besides glaring problems like ignoring embedded profiles in formats other than TIFF, even seemingly small things like automatically grabbing the display profile from the OS are still not implemented. QuarkXPress PDF export has the same color management capabilities as printing, but it can produce neither PDF/X-1a nor PDF/X-3—you’ll need a utility that can bring the appropriate PDF/X compliance level to your PDFs.

Color Management Preferences

Pay particular attention to the behavior of the Color Management Preferences window. To set the application-level color-management preferences, you must choose Edit:Preferences:Color Management with no documents open. On QuarkXPress 6 on Mac OS X, find the QuarkCMS option in the QuarkXPress>Preferences. The title bar then reads, “Color Management Preferences.” This application-level setting serves as the default settings for any newly created documents. If you have one or more documents open, the preferences apply only to the foreground document, and the title bar reads, “Color Management Preferences for <documentname>.”

The Color Management Preferences window is where you configure the Quark CMS (see Figure 15-1). The interface is the same in QuarkXPress 5 and 6. We’ll now decode it for you:

Figure 15-1 QuarkXPress Color Management Preferences

• Color Management Active checkbox: This turns color management on and off.

• Destination Profiles, Monitor: This is where you set your current display profile. The Quark CMS doesn’t grab your display profile from the operating system automatically. This may not sound like a problem, but if you open a legacy document three months from now, it will have its own color management preferences associated with it, including a display profile that probably bears no relationship to the current one.

• Destination Profiles, Composite Output: This is the profile for your composite printer. It can be an RGB or CMYK printer. In most workflows, it’s the local color printer used for proofing, but in non-press workflows it may be your final output device.

In workflows with a contract proofing device that simulates the press, you’ll want to specify the press profile here as well as in the Separation Output pop-up—proofing systems and presses are effectively the same device in these workflows.

• Destination Profiles, Separation Output: This is the profile for a separation device, such as a printing press. The only profiles that appear in this pop-up menu are CMYK and six-channel profiles. The way it’s actually triggered for making conversions at print time is by checking the “Separations” checkbox in the QuarkXPress Print dialog—see Figure 15-6. When unchecked, the Quark CMS uses the Composite Output profile.

• Default Source Profiles, RGB, CMYK, and Hexachrome: Within the respective tabs, you can select default source profiles for images and solid colors. By default, they affect untagged images and all solid colors. For images, you can use either the Get Picture dialog box or Profile Information palette to specify a profile other than the Default Source Profile. QuarkXPress doesn’t let you select RGB output device profiles as Default Source Profiles.

The Rendering Intent pop-ups serve as default rendering intents when you use “Get Picture” to place images. We usually set all of the tabs to Relative Colorimetric for RGB and CMYK images, Relative Colorimetric for RGB Solid Colors, and Absolute Colorimetric for CMYK Solid Colors.

• Solid Colors: These are colors specified in the Color palette used for text, shapes, or backgrounds. The models affected are RGB, LAB, and CMYK only. If you add Pantone, Toyo, Trumatch, or DIC colors, color management doesn’t apply—instead, you get the hardwired RGB or CMYK values specified in those palettes.

• Color Manage RGB Sources to RGB Destinations/Color Manage CMYK Sources to CMYK Destinations: These options let you allow or disallow RGB-to-RGB or CMYK-to-CMYK conversions. Checking the box lets you place images targeted for one kind of color space or device and repurpose them for a different output device. For example, placing all images separated for SWOP, then selecting a newspaper profile, repurposes the images for newsprint.

In another example, you could assume all CMYK images are “press ready.” Unchecking the box in the CMYK tab prevents CMYK images from being converted by the Quark CMS. At the same time, RGB-to-CMYK conversions for output and onscreen simulations are still allowed to happen.

Conversely, in RGB output workflows, you can disallow RGB-to-RGB conversions, assuming all RGB content is output-ready, while still allowing CMYK-to-RGB conversions.

But, if you uncheck “Color Manage RGB Sources to RGB Destinations,” it completely disables Display Simulation for those images as well. Therefore, they don’t preview as they’ll print to either RGB or CMYK output devices. The monitor is an RGB destination, but this checkbox would be a lot more useful if its effects were confined solely to RGB printers, rather than to any RGB destination, including the monitor.

And there’s an annoying bug. “Color Manage CMYK Sources to CMYK Destinations,” when unchecked, passes CMYK values directly to CMYK output with no conversion, as one would expect. But they preview as if they would be converted, so the onscreen simulation is incorrect, and the setting also prevents placed CMYK images from proofing to CMYK destinations.

• Hexachrome tab: A couple of aspects of the Hexachrome tab are a bit misleading. First, it should be named “Six-Color” because it will actually use any six-color ICC profile—not just Hexachrome, which is a proprietary six-color ink set developed by Pantone. Second, we’re confused by the presence of a Default Source Profiles tab to begin with since QuarkXPress doesn’t color manage DCS 2.0 files, which are the only way we know of to save six-channel images and get them into QuarkXPress in the first place!

• Display Simulation: This option tells QuarkXPress how the display simulation should function. None means exactly that: don’t simulate anything on the display. Monitor Color Space means convert from the source profile to the display profile for display only. Composite Output Color Space makes the display simulate the Composite printer. Separation Output Color Space makes the display simulate the Separations printer.

Note that Display Simulation isn’t wired to the “Separation” checkbox in the Print dialog that controls whether the Quark CMS converts to the Separation Output or the Composite Output profile. So it’s possible for the display to simulate one device when you actually intend to print to the other.

The Quark CMS only looks at the root level of the ColorSync profiles folder, so profiles stored in subfolders within the ColorSync Profiles folder aren’t visible. This includes the Profiles and Recommended aliases to folders containing Adobe profiles such as ColorMatch RGB, Adobe RGB (1998), and U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, among others. If you want access to those profiles from inside QuarkXPress, you need to put copies of them in the main ColorSync Profiles folder—aliases of ICC profiles don’t work, either.

Manual Controls

QuarkXPress offers only two manual controls. The controls in Get Picture apply when you’re opening images for import, while the Profile Information palette applies to images that have already been imported.

Get Picture

The Get Picture dialog box appears when you use the Get Picture command from the File menu (see Figure 15-2). When color management is active for the current document, an extra tab called Color Management appears at the bottom of the Get Picture dialog box.

Figure 15-2 Get Picture dialog box

Perhaps it’s a small bug or user interface oversight, but the Color Management tab contents remain grayed out unless you check the “Preview” checkbox in the upper-left corner of the dialog.

The Profile pop-up menu snaps to Embedded if the image you select has an embedded profile, or to Default if the image is untagged. You can override these settings by selecting another profile from the pop-up list, which then becomes the assumed source profile for the image.

The Rendering Intent pop-up snaps to the intent specified under Default Source Profiles in Color Management Preferences. You can override this here, if you wish.

The “Color Manage to RGB/CMYK Destinations” checkbox reads RGB when you click on RGB images, and CMYK when you click on CMYK images.

It has the same function as the checkbox found in Color Management Preferences in the Default Source Profiles section, and it uses the settings specified there as defaults. You can override this here, if you wish.

Profile Information

You open the Profile Information palette by choosing Profile Information from the View menu with QuarkXPress 5 and earlier. In QuarkXPress 6, You’ll find Show Profile Information in the Window menu Its controls offer identical functionality to the Get Picture dialog’s Color Management tab (see Figure 15-3). It applies only to the currently selected image. As previously mentioned, the “Color Manage to RGB/CMYK Destinations” checkbox has some bugs. We recommend you review them, and be careful.

Figure 15-3 Profile Information palette

Printing

The Print dialog box, which you open by choosing Print from the File menu, has some settings that apply whether color management is active or not, and others that only become available when color management is active.

With or without color management

The Output tab of the QuarkXPress Print dialog box deserves a brief explanation (see Figure 15-4). When color management is inactive, the Print Colors pop-up menu only shows the supported modes for the currently selected printer. If it’s a non-PostScript inkjet printer, for example, Composite CMYK isn’t an option. If it’s a PostScript printer, both Composite RGB and Composite CMYK are available options. This is normal.

Figure 15-4 Print dialog box: Output tab

When color management is active, however, the Print Colors pop-up menu grays out either Composite CMYK or Composite RGB depending on the profile selected in the Composite Output pop-up menu. If you select a CMYK profile, Composite RGB is grayed out, and if you select an RGB profile, Composite CMYK is grayed out. This is also normal.

With color management

The Profiles tab of the Print dialog box is a shortcut to the Composite and Separation Output profiles, and is only available when color management is active (see Figure 15-5). If you change them here, they only change for the current document, and the change is reflected in the document’s Color Management Preferences as well.

Figure 15-5 Print dialog box: Profiles tab

You invoke XPress’s built-in hard proofing by checking the “Composite Simulates Separation” checkbox in the Profiles tab of the Print dialog box. It always uses relative colorimetric rendering, so simulating the source white on your proof isn’t possible. The potential gotcha is the “Color Manage CMYK Sources to CMYK Destinations” checkbox associated with each image. When this is turned off, the CMYK image isn’t color managed at all, including to the Composite Output device. The CMYK values in the image pass straight through to the composite printer, so no simulation takes place.

Last, and certainly not least, you may have noticed there are two possible output profiles: Composite Output, or Separations Output. Which one is used as the destination? In the Layout tab of the Print dialog box is a “Separations” checkbox. When unchecked, the composite profile is used, and when checked the separations profile is used (see Figure 15-6). If you print composite PostScript to your imagesetter or platesetter RIP, you need to select your final output profile as Composite Output when it’s time to print.

Figure 15-6 Print dialog box: Layout tab

Hard Proofing

QuarkXPress 3 has no press simulation features, and the ones in QuarkXPress 4 don’t work, so hard proofing using built-in color management isn’t applicable. QuarkXPress 5 and 6’s built-in method of producing hard proofs on composite devices has some limitations: if you use TIFF images only; can always use the “Color Manage CMYK Sources to CMYK Destinations” option; and don’t need to proof Pantone, FocolTone, or other named color systems, the built-in method works quite well. But if your workflow relies on EPS files, or Pantone, Focoltone, or other named color systems, you’ll need to look for a third-party solution.

Third-party proofing solutions come in several forms. Praxisoft’s Compass Pro XT XTension, color servers, and self-contained proofing systems all have strengths and weaknesses, including cost, support, and deployment issues. We recommend you see a demo of any products you’re interested in, to be sure that they’ll meet your needs. See the next section on Compass Pro XT for more information.

Vector Pro

Compass Pro XT’s companion application, Vector Pro, can simulate Pantone or Focoltone colors using hand-tuned RGB, CMYK, or multichannel builds. Vector Pro then outputs these customized, output-device-specific colors as Vector Pro palettes, which you can import into Compass Pro XT. Without Vector Pro, Compass Pro XT does a decent job of simulating solid colors, but if you’re looking for an extra level of accuracy, you’ll want Vector Pro.

Compass Pro XT

Compass Pro XT, discussed in more detail below, is an XTension for QuarkXPress 3, 4, 5 and 6 that lets you turn any profiled printer with a sufficiently large gamut into a proofing device, and offers an assortment of other useful features. It’s published by Praxisoft (www.praxisoft.com), and the currently available versions are: v2.2 for QuarkXPress 3 and 4, v5 for QuarkXPress 5, and v6 for QuarkXPress 6.

Pros

For individuals and relatively small organizations, this is probably the least-expensive way to produce proofs with existing equipment. If you can also exploit other features offered by Compass Pro XT, its value increases exponentially.

Cons

This product is feature-rich, and despite decent documentation and a fairly straightforward user interface, it has a learning curve—it’s not a point-and-print kind of system. In larger organizations, even with the price breaks Praxisoft offers for purchasing multiple quantities, you’ll quickly find yourself in a price range comparable to that of the other solutions.

Compass Pro XT can convert documents for any RGB or CMYK destination, be it the Internet, a large-format inkjet, or a printing press. It can also convert documents for proofing purposes, so your lower-cost printer can simulate final output. It’s flexible enough to be used in virtually any workflow calling for this kind of functionality from within QuarkXPress.

The file types it supports include not only the usual TIFF, JPEG, and PICT suspects, but also EPS (including Illustrator EPS). It also manages QuarkXPress Color palette colors (in RGB, LAB, and CMYK modes), as well as Pantone and Focoltone colors. It doesn’t, however, support PDF.

Compass Pro XT offers three unique features:

• It’s totally happy allowing multiple source profiles in a document: you can place images directly into your documents whether they’re from Photoshop, digital cameras, scanners, or stock photography, each with its own source profile. You can mix and match RGB and CMYK images into the same layout, and Compass Pro XT converts all images (except for grayscale, which it leaves untouched) properly to the desired destination.

• It’s the only way to color manage EPS files inside a page-layout program. Not only does it color manage RGB, LAB, and CMYK colors inside EPS files, but also Pantone and Focoltone colors. It even color manages EPSs or TIFFs embedded within an imported EPS file.

• It supports RGB output device profiles, so in an RGB-destination workflow, it lets you color manage content to RGB output devices in all versions of QuarkXPress, including both RGB final output devices and RGB proofers.

Another useful feature is the ability to make a duplicate of an entire QuarkXPress document, images and all, converted to a specific output profile—so you can rework those files instead of the originals, or send the press-ready duplicate back to the originator, to the service bureau, or to the printer.

One last note is that the features in Compass Pro XT are extremely customizable. Even hard-core CMYK-only output workflows going to known specific presses can take advantage of this XTension. For example, you can disable all CMYK-to-CMYK conversions, but enable RGB-to-CMYK conversions to catch the occasional RGB image that slips through. You can also take advantage of Compass Pro’s solid-to-process conversions, which use builds calculated for your specific press condition instead of the generic ones published in the Pantone Solid to Process Guide. Get a copy for each workstation that does preflighting to weed out RGB images that haven’t been separated yet, and rebuild solid-to-process colors correctly as a standard operating procedure.

The 800-Pound Gorilla

QuarkXPress still dominates the page-layout market despite some stiff competition from Adobe’s InDesign, but its color management capabilities, though greatly improved in version 5 and 6, still have rather more than their fair share of quirks. Nevertheless, as long as you’re aware of the limitations and occasional oddities, you can make the Quark CMS work well in many workflows. For those workflows that need a more capable solution, XPress is well supported both by XTensions such as Compass Pro XT and by external color servers.