Articles by
Shelby Sapusek
Shelby Sapusek started in the newspaper industry; working in graphic design and pre-press. She’s been working in the wide-format print industry since 2011. Today, she travels to printing facilities to work with graphic designers, end users and manufacturers to improve their color management skills.
Title: Color Management Consultant, CMO of ColorCasters, LLC
Why Printer Maintenance is Important in Color Management
It was mid-summer in the Midwest. My business partner and I were driving from our home state to an adjoining one. Our mission was to spend a couple of days profiling printers for a new client. As always, we had gathered some information before we accepted the job. We knew we were going to be…
How To Create Named Spot Colors in Adobe (and Your RIP)
Before learning how to create named spot colors, it’s important to understand what they are and how they are used. Just a few weeks ago, my business partner Jim Raffel and I presented “How Important Is Brand Color?” at the ISA International Sign Expo in Las Vegas. Many print facilities are tasked with achieving accurate…
Keeping It Neutral: Creating the Ideal Workspace to View Color
How we view and assess color is important throughout a color management strategy. While we can’t solely trust our eyes alone, there are steps we can take that make it easier and better for our eyes to see color. The Problem with Our Eyes Human eyes are frail. They become less effective with age. We…
Reviewing Your Color Management Strategy: What Variables Are at Play?
Color management issues often aren’t discovered until we are viewing what we hoped would be the final print product. And since that’s where the problems are found, our instinct tells us that we should fix them there – at the end of the printing process. However, there are many variables that can affect color quality…
Mistakes That Can Affect Color Reproduction
When you’re trying to achieve consistent and repeatable color, your first inclination might be to jump right into making test prints, profiling your printer, or downloading profiles from ColorBase.com. But there are several tasks that should be addressed beforehand. By failing to address these variables, you can easily make a mistake that will affect your…
Why Monitor Calibration Is Important For Color Management
As human beings, we can see millions and millions of colors with our eyes. Of course, we want to be able to recreate all those colors in our prints. But that’s impossible. While we can see all these colors, our computer monitors can theoretically reproduce about 17 million colors. Beyond that, our printing devices can…