Thinck.com Launches Online ICC Colour Profiling Service To Deliver Affordable Colour Accuracy


Penryn - Antwerp, May 23, 2006 - Thinck.com announces the launch of its ICC Colour Profiling Service, which makes high-quality colour management available at affordable prices to a broad audience of semi-professionals and professionals in a number of industries.

Desktop publishers, graphic designers and both semi-professional and professional photographers who recognize the need for accurate and consistent colour from camera or scan to printout will benefit from Thinck.com's focus on delivering high-quality, yet affordable colour profiles Ñ the most important building blocks in a colour management workflow Ñ created with the latest equipment and software from GretagMacbeth and X-Rite.

Colour experts will invariably tell you ICC profiles tailored to the specific printer and paper combination are better than generic profiles. However, custom-made ICC profiles are prohibitively expensive for most photographers, desktop publishers and designers.

"Thinck.com is changing all that by delivering a profiling service at very affordable prices. It will allow users to finally get everything out of their equipment colour-wise without breaking the bank," said Erik Vlietinck, owner of Thinck.com and publisher of various articles on the subject (see also: http://www.it-enquirer.com).

Thinck.com's on-line service works simple and straightforward. Customers of printer profiles download the appropriate test charts (colour targets), print them and send them back to Thinck.com by postal mail. Less than a week later, they receive the printer profile in their email box. Currently, Thinck.com delivers scanner and RGB or CMYK printer profiles, with more services planned later this year.

Prices start at €30.00 for a scanner profile and €45.00 for a RGB or CMYK printer profile. A subscription scheme with considerable discounts is in the making. Thinck.com applies a money-back guarantee of 15 days after the profile has been sent.

Why colour management?
In the world of silver halide photo prints and analogue publishing, photographers pointed their camera at something, clicked, and had prints made that matched reality. This is what chemists at Fuji, Agfa and Kodak provided with film. In a digital world, the camera has to talk to the computer, which needs to talk to a printer, and in-between there's the photographer, designer, or desktop publisher, who needs to evaluate the colours on a monitor screen.

Somehow, the colour information coming from and going to all those devices needs to get passed along accurately and consistently. But each device has different colour characteristics - the language they speak in terms of colour, is not the same. A scanner will "see" colour totally different from an inkjet. This is where colour management and ICC colour profiling step in.

Colour management relies on characterising colour devices and converting colour spaces so that the gamut of one device is translated into the gamut of another in a visually pleasing (e.g. for photography) or accurate way (e.g. for making press proofs). Colour management matters to various industries: photography, printing, textile, paint, even the web.

Thinck.com ICC Colour Profiling Service delivers the building blocks for successful colour management: the profiles. Colour profiles involve users early in the process: desktop publishers creating layouts, graphic designers creating EPS files, photographers shooting in RAW and transforming their photos into TIFF or JPEG. The result is a more consistent and better use of colour. Using colour management properly can result in more brilliance in photographs, or accurate matching of a colour destined to be printed on a commercial printing press, and reproduced on an inkjet proofer.

More Information
For more information on Thinck.com's service, visit http://www.thinck.com .

For more information on colour management in general, please visit IT-Enquirer (http://www.it-enquirer.com).