Reader's Digest:
Mac Shows True Colours
The Reader’s Digest. It’s a publishing phenomenon: the world’s biggest-selling magazine, with 48 editions in 19 different languages available in over 60 countries. And whether you buy your copy in Basingstoke or Bangalore, at least one thing will remain constant — the quality and colour balance of the images.
It wasn’t always so. Until just over two years ago, the different editions were produced at many different sites, and colour management — the tricky business of making sure that the image you see on the page looks the same as the original — was highly problematic. That all changed when Reader’s Digest got together with London-based premedia and data management company Colour Systems to set up a single European production centre built around a Mac-based workflow.
“The new Apple Cinema Displays are very consistent, and lend themselves to colour-critical remote soft proofing”
“The prepress industry relies on Macs”, says David Brin, Joint Managing Director of the Fresh Media Group, Colour Systems’ parent company. “We couldn’t do anything without the Mac — everyone uses it: the publishers, the designers, the prepress companies”.
Much of the success of the project has been down to the use of Mac OS X’s built-in colour management technology, ColorSync.
“The various Reader’s Digest editorial offices around Europe all run on Apple equipment. Their soft proofs wouldn’t work without ColorSync — in fact the whole workflow wouldn’t work. We can centralise production for 19 editions of the magazine here in London, taking the original files, which are in many cases American, converting them from an American standard to a European one using ColorSync, and then soft proofing around Europe”.
Reader’s Digest. It’s a publishing phenomenon: the world’s biggest-selling magazine, with 48 editions in 19 different languages available in over 60 countries.
Jamie Rose, Fresh Media’s Workflow Solutions Manager, adds: “The Macintosh has been the leader in the publishing and design environment ever since I’ve been in the industry, which is about 12 years now. All the designers have gone down that path, and we’ve followed suit. We’re big fans of the Mac because of the reliability it gives us, and because it does exactly what it says on the tin. We use a mixture of Power Mac G4s and G5s, all tied in with an Apple Xserve server.
“One of the requirements of the Reader’s Digest workflow was to profile the press and provide proofs to the customer that matched what was actually going to appear. We brought the profiling in-house, which meant relying on ColorSync. This colour management facility is now standard across the board. We can simulate it on print, proofs and on-screen — and the entire solution is based on the Mac platform”.
“We couldn’t do anything without the Mac — everyone uses it: the publishers, the designers, the prepress companies.”
When the Colour Systems team were designing the Reader’s Digest workflow, they recognised the need for a preflighting solution that would resolve colour mismatches and standardise the CMYK data of the working files. They turned to Paris-based Alwan Colour Expertise, one of Europe’s leading colour management consultancies and a member of the Apple Solution Experts network — that select band of Apple-accredited independents who can help both large and small businesses buy, install, learn and support Mac-based solutions.
Alwan have developed and marketed a breakthrough software solution called CMYK Optimizer, which harmonises colour separations and eliminates printability issues, resulting in a more streamlined workflow and significant savings on ink costs. And it runs on Apple’s Xserve.
“It’s rock solid, a real no-brainer. Once it’s set up, you just drag and drop PDFs or images into the relevant hot folder, and it will action the optimisation.”
“It’s rock solid, a real no-brainer”, says Jamie Rose. “Once it’s set up, you just drag and drop PDFs or images into the relevant hot folder, and it will action the optimisation. And as far as the end-users are concerned — the operators and production staff — they just log onto the Xserve and access everything from there”.
Adds David Brin: “The Reader’s Digest carries adverts from all sorts of sources, many of which are not produced to the correct specification. With the CMYK Optimizer running on Xserve, we are able to optimise these ads to print correctly from a central server that everyone can access”.
David’s confident that Apple will continue to provide the kind of technology that companies like his needs: “We are currently beta-testing the new Apple Cinema Displays with a view to integrating them into our workflow for soft proofing. At the moment, we use CRT displays, not LCD, for colour profiling on screen. But the new Apple Cinema Displays are very consistent, and lend themselves to colour-critical remote soft proofing”.
Alwan’s founder and Managing Director Elie Khoury succintly sums up the advantages of running such a large-scale workflow on the Mac platform: “ColorSync is a really extraordinary chance for the publishing and printing industries to carry out colour management, calculations, adjustments and adaptation using the same framework — it’s simply the best system-level colour management available today. If, for example, you do colour management on your ten-year-old desktop Mac, and I’m running a five-year-old PowerBook, while our printer has a brand new Mac OS X server, we’ll all get exactly the same results. No other platform can do that”.
