Color Management In QuarkXPress 6.x for the Absolute Beginner

Recently I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use an ICC pro­file for out­putting a col­or PDF from Quark for use in a post­card mail­ing. Surprising as it was to me, it was the first time I’d had the call to use col­or man­ag­ment in QuarkXPress 6.5. From being unaware of how to use it, it was actu­al­ly rather easy to do, and here are the basics.

When, What, Why

Color man­age­ment becomes impor­tant because not every device–display or print–will ren­der the col­or you deter­mine the way it will actu­al­ly meant to be seen. The aim is that what you see is what you get.

For instance, say you’re run­ning QuarkXPress 6.x on your trusty Mac, with an Apple Studio Display and an SooperDooperGrafic laser print­er for proofs. If you sim­ply use XPress with­out set­ting any­thing else up, you get Quark’s default ver­sions of col­ors. With col­or man­age­ment, how­ev­er, you can tell Quark to dis­play accord­ing to the qual­i­ties of your Studio Display, and you can tell Quark to map those col­ors appro­pri­ate to the out­put spec­i­fi­ca­tions of your SooperDooperGrafic laser.

You’ll want to use col­or man­age­ment to view the col­ors as close to what they ought to actu­al­ly look like for the device you’re using. That way, what you see is, as close as pos­si­ble, what you get at out­put time.

Setting Up for Color

The set­ting up of Quark’s CMS in 6.x involve two main steps. In Quark, we found our CMS off by default, so we had to turn it on. Going to Preferences>Quark CMS, we were revealed the fol­low­ing pane (click to enlarge):

The QuarkXPress 6.5 Preferences open to the “QuarkCMS” pane. Checking the box at top enables CMS.

Since we’re look­ing at this from the per­spec­tive of the tyro, we’ll only go in as far as we had to to get our doc­u­ment print­ed for the tar­get device.

What has to hap­pen before any­thing else is that one must enable Quark CMS, and that’s done by check­ing the “Color Management Active” check­box at the top of the pane, which acti­vates the con­trols in that pane (when not active, all the con­trols are dimmed down and inac­cess­able). In Windows this is accom­plished by choos­ing a Color Management Module (CMM) from the drop­down. Of course, as with every pref­er­ence which is set­table at both the doc­u­ment and the glob­al lev­el, set­ting the pref­er­ence while no doc­u­ment is open den­ter­mines the pref­er­ence for the appli­ca­tion whilst set­ting it with a doc­u­ment open sets it only for that document.

• The top part of the pane, Destination Profiles, gov­erns con­trol on out­put devices. The drop­downs here are sim­ple and straight­for­ward, allow­ing set­ting pro­files for Monitor, Composite, and Separation out­put. Choose the extant pro­file that match­es the need.
• The bot­tom part of the pane, Source Profiles, allows you to tell Quark how you want to see things, and spec­i­fies for sol­id col­ors as well as images. Of note here is the “Rendering Intent” pull­down, which allows fine-tuning of the ren­der along Default, Perceptual, Relative and Abosolute Colorimetric, and Saturation modes along with the Profile Default. Finally, at the very bot­tom, the CMS allows you to sim­u­late the col­or space in the display.

Quark’s ICC Profile man­ag­er (click to enlarge).

Part two of acti­vat­ing the CMS comes when using the Profile Manager. Found under the Utilities menu (Utilities>Profile Manager…) it allows con­trol of which pro­files are avail­able as well as detem­i­ning where aux­il­iary profiles–the ones the user collects–get stored.

The default stor­age space for Auxiliary pro­files is in Macintosh HD/System/Library/ColorsSync/Profiles, in Win ME and before C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\COLOR, and Win 2000 and XT C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\COLOR, which is where all default ICC pro­files are stored. The user can store the Auxiliary pro­files they col­lect here, or cre­ate sep­a­rate fold­ers for sep­a­rate jobs and clients. The Profile Manager is where this set­ting gets changed.

We are "Go" for Color

So, you’ve got CMS turned on, and you know what the Profile Manager is and how you could use it. What next?

The fol­low­ing exam­ple should demon­strate by exam­ple. Recently I found it nec­es­sary to design a post­card which was to be print­ed by a cer­tain off­site print­er. When the proof was deliv­ered to us we found that the image was duller than we want­ed. We were out­putting from Quark with no CMS. The solu­tion was to cre­ate out­put from Quark that under­stood the print­er we were actu­al­ly going to print from. The work­flow was approx­i­mate­ly as follows:

1. First, we obtained the ICC pro­file for the print­er from the ser­vice bureau, xeikon_test.icc. This is our Auxiliary profile.
2. Next step was to install the pro­file. We could have put it in the sys­tem ICC fold­er with the rest of them, but chose not to; instead, we decid­ed to keep it sep­a­rate by cre­at­ing an Auxiliary pro­file fold­er in (we used a Mac) /Applications/QuarkXPress/Auxiliary Profiles. After obtain­ing and unar­chiv­ing the ICC file, it was dropped into this folder.
3. We next quit QuarkXPress and relaunched the Finder, in order to make the ICC pro­file vis­i­ble to Quark. Restarting Quark and open­ing the Profile Manager we were able to find xeikon_test.icc in the pro­files list; tick­ing the check­box acti­vat­ed it for QuarkXPress.

Getting What You Want

After at last get­ting the ICC Profile into place and acti­vat­ed with Quark, using it is per­haps the sim­plest step of all: just choose the pro­file you want to use from the drop down list in the “Profiles” tab of the Print dia­log out­put. If enabled by your print­er descrip­tion, you have a dia­log which offers spec­i­fy­ing the pro­file for either Separation or Composite out­put. If export­ing a PDF, this query is avail­able by click­ing the “Options…” but­ton in the PDF out­put dia­log and choos­ing the “Profiles” tab.

ICC pro­files and CMS are all about you accu­rate­ly get­ting what you want, and QuarkXPress 6.x pro­vides the basic tools you’ll need to approx­i­mate the results you want.