I didn't realize how fun building color profiles could be until I started working here! lol I'm kidding of course. Today, when I was on lunch, (I usually take my lunch to this lake a few miles away that's situated between homes, condos and a shopping center. Pretty nice.) I was thinking about where I was working before and where I am working now. When I was at America's Instant Signs, I was learning alot about the production/installation aspect of signs and hoping to get in alot of experience while there. Well, that was cut short because of the accident. And now, I'm getting into an area that I have very little knowledge of, mainly digital printing and application. See, at AIS I was fairly confident working with Flexisign, cutting, weeding & taping and applying vinyl on pretty much every substrate. Now, at SignsNow, it's pretty much all digital prints, which is a whole new area, cause the printing and application and setting up are pretty different. With regular vinyl, setting it up for application is very easy and manageable. With digital vinyl, setting up is a little trickier for application in order to line it up straight, PLUS getting the colors right is whole 'nother ball game! And that's what were doing at work right now, creating new profiles for the media we have and fine tuning the color linearization and everything. My coworker is all into it, he's more a techie than I am and likes to get pretty meticulous. But today when work was done, he was still talking about this stuff and inside I was thinking 'okay, enough already, too much info today, I just want to take a break from this stuff!' Seriously, after 5pm, I was done! lol Yeah, I still stayed a bit to finish up, but it's a little hard to wrap up your day when someone is talking to you at the same time about technicalities. But, I tried to make an effort cause it IS important, yeah.
Anyhow, all that to say I'm really being challenged with this new system of production. But at the same time, I'm growing, and that's what I'm stoked about! I admit, I'm thankful that I'm not just doing the same 'ole every day and learning nothing new. These challenges are helping me, indeed God is helping me, get to where I want to be: in a management position. That's ultimately my plan and desire. I believe He knew that when He put me in the Organizational Leadership program at Biola. He knows what He's doing. :) So I knew it wasn't a coincidence when my boss, the owner, told me he wanted me to be in charge of the production part of the morning meetings. I basically have to let everyone know what's on the agenda for the day. Believe me, at first it was hard to hear, but I knew this was a much needed step I needed to take.
Speaking of ICC profiles, I've been learning quite a bit about profiling a new media from scratch, which we're doing right now. We're using the Onyx Postershop RIP application along with the HP 8000s printer. I downloaded the instructions from our SignsNow site, which is actually on the Onyx site. While going through it we realized that it isn't very thorough. For example, if after doing a scan of the Advanced grayscale chart, the linearization has all kinds of spikes and such and cannot be built, there are no instructions on what to do at that point. Do we start all over again or what? So we had to do some research on these things. We have plenty of support with SignsNow on these issues, but...my cooworker is just very adament about solving this problem by himself! But my thought is, instead of trying to figure out every single corner before we get it right and spending hrs doing it, why not call for support and get it right with someone who knows what they're talking about! Seriously, he's almost...stubborn about it. But he's the kind of guy who just wont give in. But...we need to get this figured out or we're going to be on this ALL WEEK! Anyhow, notwithstanding the venting here, it's actually been both a challenging as well as a good learning experience.
Tomorrow will be an interesting day and I hope we get at least one media profile finished and ready to go, that would be nice in itself.
A quick side note: today was actually the coldest day since Summer now! I'm not sure what the temp was, but when I left this morning for work it was nice and cool for the first time in awhile, and tonite it's been windy and actually COLD. Most of today was overcast so I think that helped to cool it down. But it seems to me that after that scalding Labor Day which seemed like the hottest day of the year so far, it's been cooling down, which is just...wonderful. =)
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