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Folks,

The following just came to me off-list from the head of the color department at a printing firm whose name would be known to most of us. Although it was addressed to me personally, it seems like something that list members might wish to comment on as well.

Dan Margulis

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Subj: High End Color Correction - Still of value?

Date: Monday, February 5, 2007 7:35:19 PM

From:

To: Dan Margulis

Hi Dan,

Hope you are doing well. I just purchased your new edition of Professional Photoshop. Very well done. Thank you for all your effort. We have found it very useful here at [name of company].

In the first edition of Professional Photoshop [he refers to the 1994 edition--D.M.] you made this statement:

"Color correction fluency is not picked up easily. The basic techniques are mature: electronic scanners, which color-correct in much the same way we do today, were introduced nearly 20 years ago. Throughout that time, those skilled at correcting color, whether by hand or on sophisticated systems, have been the highest-paid and most sought-after people in the industry - more so than photographers, strippers, typographers, designers, or art directors." - page x.

I know the printing industry has changed quite a bit from the days of photographic separations, but digital separations can be just as problematic. Are there still color artists / companies (besides yourself) who are viewed by the industry with the same esteem you mention above? Or is the skill of digital color correction viewed by the industry at large as a simple process that requires little talent?

Many people who have a camera think they are a photographer (anyone can take a picture), which has helped devalue what real photographers can do. The attitude I have faced locally regarding color correction is similar - that anyone with Photoshop can produce acceptable results because the individual who produces separations isn't really an "artist," because it doesn't take much talent. This concern has many implications, especially with regard to making a carrier out of color correcting. How do you feel about this? Has the apparent waning of respect for this field by some in the industry reached a point of no return? Does the value of what we produce day-in and day-out still equal the best efforts of industry designers or art directors?

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We still have dedicated "Color" people in our Pre Press.

Although Managment would love to be able to hand out work to everyone and anyone its just not possible.

All of our Color people are X Scanner and Scitex operators that have 25+ years in the trade. The newbies that have come into the trade in the past 10 or 15 years do not have that type of experience.

Knowning Color and what your clients need are, along with being able to make quick decisions when the press is down is still an art.....

Our Jobs dictate who can work on them, we will have some of the easier tasks like masking handled by everyone but the Color Critical is only done by a few.

So yes I would say my company holds it of High Value in todays ever changing print shop.

John R

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I can say from experience that there is still a high value in the skill sets mentioned above. I just took a new job, moving from a lithographic trade shop, to working for a conglomeration of three of our biggest clients. I am well paid and I am classified as a process artist/retoucher. The majority of work that I perform is retouching, but also includes a vast amount of "color retouching" and high end color correction. The outcome is used for advertising for the automotive industry. In this regard, the skill required to meet the level of expectation is still very high and requires a vast amount of knowledge. This is something that was very much a part of the job requirement/description from this employer.

I can not speak for the printing industry as a whole because I have not worked directly for a printer since the early 1980's when the skills you mention above were very much sought after. But, in the right market place, these skill sets are still very much in demand. I would assume that this also includes certain type of printers as well.

Regards,

Jerry P'Simer

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Hi Guys

I am running an in-house advertising agency for a mid sized corporate here in Australia that services an international market place.

Thanks Dan for raising this - here is my perspective on what Dan has raised as a very serious issue.

I should say that we do a heavy amount of Photoshop work - both at the levels of rendering for new product concepts and high end corporate magazines and product brochures. All image acquisition, manipulation and prepress is done "in-house". LAB, RGB and CMYK color spaces are all used at some point for what we do. Equally, web, print, DVD and photographic outputs are all relevant output modalities to us.

My main premise is that technology is now obsoleting certain industries and it is affecting everyone in different ways. No surprises there!

There is no doubt, in my opinion, that we are now in an era of what I call "amateurization" of photography and color correction because the tools to undertake this work are now readily available at a price point that has become affordable to the mass market. The mystery surrounding the dark room and color correction has been revealed in consumer magazines that are available at any newsagency today.

Companies like Adobe, Nikon, Canon, Apple, Dell etc have decided that they will make more money by selling products and tools like Photoshop and devices like high end DSLRs and workstations to the consumer market than nurturing a far smaller and more demanding (i.e. less profitable) professional market.

This presents a considerable challenge to our industry because the high end skill sets of proper photography and careful color correction are not really generally understood or appreciated in the advertising agency industry or even generally now, in the executive arena where the money is being authorized to spend on projects. There are of course exceptions and this statement is a generalization based on feedback that I have gotten from other colleagues.

There is however, one noticeable exception that I have identified.

Anytime you have a scenario of having a premium brand that has to connect with potential high-end lucrative spending customers and where imagery is central to the creative execution - then you need serious photography and prepress skills to prepare the advertising materials today . In this respect, nothing has changed over the last 20 years.

But even as little as 5 years ago, you had to have a prepress and film component with ANY job that was destined for an offset printer. Today, the prepress is largely done by most printers who probably don't really care or appreciate all the issues that traditional pre-press houses made a living of dealing with. Printers equate pre-press with pushing a button to send work directly to a plate making device. Printers tell me that clients "won't spend the money anymore on this stuff"...."the market has gone".... So general printing work is very average to say the least. Flat lighting, bland colors, indifferent page design, cheap paper etc etc. The problem is largely coming from the client themselves. Printers have to eat like all of us.

Also, lets not blame the printers because the technology has really sped everything up to a point where customers expect same day or next day turnaround. Everything now is set to automate the process. All the checking, proper stip proofing and careful job examination is a casualty of this mentality.

Another major factor is the way that marketing that has gone - markets have become segmented and then segmented again. Product lifecycles are much shorter. The market place is more turbulent and we are in an era of instant gratification and disposability. This has meant that jobs are not as critical/appreciated now as they once were. I mean to say that with the web and now the phone opening up as a serious method of engaging consumers, more emphasis is placed on promotional activities and short term rewarding methods like frequent flyer points. Printing is not the only game in town to engage a consumer.

All this leads back to one point - that is US in the industry. What are we doing to educate our customers about why they need us? Are we lifting our game to another level that amateurs can't reach? Finally, do we recognize that the greatest threat to our industry is simply customer indifference?

Robert de Paola

Advertising Manager - EGR

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Holy cow- Robert you hit the nail on the head, and Dan bringing up this point is crucial. There has been a nexus of all Robert has mentioned.(plus the addition of pro-amateurs shooting stock)

BUT there is light at the end of the tunnel. I think there is some of a backlash.

I consider myself an expert skin retoucher, and people are flocking to me in the last year or so because their clients are rejecting the "photoshopped" look of men and women and want a more natural look. Even the term "photoshopped" has entered the pop cultre lexicon.

I constantly have people ask me "how do you get skin to look so real"

Look at European magazines and you see more "natural" looking people. I believe (and hope) this will trickle to US markets.

Also, there are the art directors who think they know photoshop but are jokers themselves. I was working a shoot and the art director went on and on how he could make the shot look like night time in photoshop. Finially I got sick of his bs and blurted out to the photographer "change the color temp of your camera to 4200k" they did this and I swear they thought I was a genius.....no I just know color by the numbers, including temperature.

Point being, these guys (some that I know) are getting tired of trying to fix things themselves and are realizing others can do it better and faster.

Alan Klement

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Remember when programs like CorelDraw! flooded the market and every secretary was doing graphics? It's over. The professionals have taken back over. I guess the same is going to happen with photography. We don't only have to be able to correct images well - we have to be able to do this in an efficient way in order to make money out of it. Right now I am losing some work to amateur photographers, but I am sure these clients are going to be back, knocking on my door sooner than they expected.

Werner Tschan

--

STUDIO LTD

Atelier für Fotografie

Altenbergstrasse 8

CH-3013 Bern

T: ++41(0)31 332 88 33

F: ++41 (0)31 331 62 42

M: ++41(0)79 227 02 19

U: www.studio-ltd.com

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The anonymous manager in a major printing company wrote (quoting the 1994 version of

Professional Photoshop):

Well, photographic separations are before my time (except for originals that could not physically be wrapped around a drum) but certainly the environment has changed. The last sentence of the quote I think has remained true since 1994--they are the most sought-after, and highest-paid, people in the industry--but they're working in nontraditional places.

The top professional retouchers (at least in the big cities) still command big bucks. This was particularly true in the runup to the dot-com bust, when the shortage of qualified people was so great that even some people of rather inferior skills had six-figure incomes. But the sheer number of professional retouchers has gone down, for a number of reasons, and there are a lot of developments that have clouded the issue, namely:

*In 1994, anybody getting work color-corrected was spending thousands of dollars to do so. That fact pretty well disqualified anybody who wasn't interested in quality. Today, with color costing a tiny fraction as much, you get all kinds of people who don't care how good the result is. Naturally, these people don't appreciate color correction--but they don't eliminate the people who do.

*In 1994, the world at large didn't even know the basics. The edition of Professional Photoshop that you speak of caused as big a stir in its day as Photoshop LAB Color did last year, largely because it made the shocking suggestion that people should try to set a proper highlight and shadow. It's something every beginner knows today, but back then, it seemed like magic. *Anybody* who knew how to do that looked like a genius.

*Pre-1994, anybody who wanted top quality HAD to hold professional retouchers in high esteem. An art director, a photographer, a corporate desktop publisher would be extremely unlikely to own the equipment needed to do serious color correction. If they did own it, the chances are they would not have known how to get quality work out of it. But the fastest dedicated graphic arts workstation of 1994 is like a three-legged tortoise on Quaaludes in comparison to the cheapest computers available today--and the knowledge of how to color-correct is widespread.

Consequently, in 1994 "those skilled at corrrecting color" invariably worked at a prepress house or printer. The prepress houses are now gone and not as many of the printers are interested in the subject now as used to be. So, if you limit the field to those working for service providers, yes, probably they are held in less esteem, and no longer paid as much as, say, skilled pressmen.

But as to whether *on the whole* those skilled at correcting color are "the highest-paid and most sought-after people in the industry" I would say emphatically yes. Any creative who works in an advertising agency but can't handle color is on borrowed time. Few professional photographers can even stay in business without offering some type of supplementary color-related service. Corporate production people who don't know how to color-correct walk around with a big target on their backs.

Do people who have little interest in quality hold retouchers in high esteem? Probably not, but it's unfair to consider such folk because none of them were around in 1994. But for the employers of everybody mentioned above, the words you quoted from 1994 still hold, now more than ever.

Dan Margulis

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Dan:

I was shocked to see the poor print quality in Macleans just recently. For those of you who don't get up to Canada very much, this would be the Canadian equivalent to Time Magazine. Their circulation is, or perhaps was,among the highest of Canadian magazines.

Certainly the cover is closely monitored but many of the stories inside the periodical appear as though someone sent the camera original through to the platemaker and let 'er RIP. They didn't even hit "auto levels" en route. This was definitely not the case when I ceased being a regular reader many years ago.

Will this type of cost cutting catch up to them sometime soon? No doubt the same folks who laid off the pre-press people would blanche at the idea of letting the copy editors go.

My experience in the retail wars is that there's a large market of folks who are visually brain dead, and cost is the *only* thing that matters. They'd spot a typo, though, and get right 'raged about it.

You wouldn't ever have said that the color quality at Macleans was top-of-the-line but I never thought I would see a national newsmagazine with quality this bad.

Ron Kelly

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Guys

I'd like to add two comments to Dan's reply.

The digital separations are indeed problematic - but only if you are aware of what you are looking for. As general observation here, the problem today as I see it is that amateurs are oblivious to the problems and clients are now not being sold color as a value added service as part of a disciplined process. So they are equally oblivious.

Maybe the real question is how many of you "color gurus" out there "today" are now pulling 6 figure salaries? The logic behind this question is simply that you are paid a salary commensurable with the value an employer believes that you are worth i.e. "held in high esteem".

Has this number grown or shrunk compared to 1994?

Given that ad agencies (& customers who prepare their own files) have effectively replaced the role of the traditional pre-press house & pro scanner operator today because we live in a largely "PDF centric" world, do the majority of clients really care anymore that professional color correction/professional retouching is not being undertaken on up to 80 percent of jobs being printed today simply because the images are now starting to be fed from some amateur/semi pro digital camera?

Could this situation support a contention that the professional retoucher's low/mid-end jobs have vanished and what is left is only the upper end of the market who absolutely demand quality color?

regards

Robert

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I'm making less money than in… 1984

(but with a lot less overtime)

so much less that I sometimes can't find work at all : )

35 years of pre press and much more

Laurentiu Todie

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Robert De Paola writes,

It's likely that few people will volunteer to say what they make, other than to comment that it isn't nearly enough.

*Salaries* in the six-figure range are uncommon except among managers who have a strong technical background, and even then are found only in large cities. It is politically rather difficult at most companies to pay such high salaries to full-time non-managers. The people who earn this kind of money are paid by the hour.

As for "held in high esteem", the hourly rates that the *top* people get speak for themselves. There's more high-end work than ever now, and sensible employers realize that if a top person can deliver ten times the value of some somebody without a lot of correction experience, they can certainly be paid six times as much per hour.

Adjusting for inflation, the percentage shrunk, because there's not the shortage of skilled people that there used to be, consequently a skilled person is not able to find unlimited hours of work. It's a question of economic distortions.

When there's more work than skilled persons available, earnings soar, particularly in the cities. The most striking such examples were in the late 1980s and the late 1990s. In each case there was an explosion of color work being done. In the late 1980s, electronic systems weren't powerful enough to siphon much of it off, resulting in enormous demand for skilled strippers. My company had around 100 full-time strippers, and they were offered unlimited overtse people were making, in today's dollars, over $300,000 a year--and several weren't even high-school graduates.

Similarly, in the run-up to the dot-com bust, there was unlimited work available in the big cities to qualified retouchers, with the result that I mentioned: some people of very questionable competence were making the sort of money being mentioned here.

Today, it's unlikely this can happen. Employers don't paying people this much because they want to be nice or because they think that retouchers are particularly deserving; they're doing it because they need to get the work done right and can't find another alternative. The moment that such an alternative becomes available, they jump for it. That's worked to the benefit of many on this list, particularly certain photographers, who have increased their own profitability by taking on such retouching work, while making it tougher for the dedicated freelancers to make a buck.

Dan Margulis