Mac OS

PDF documents in Mac OS X Tiger can be further refined using Quartz Filters. These filters let you apply color management, color effects, and other processing options such as compression or creation of files in PDF/X-3 format. To access Quartz Filters, click Filters in the toolbar of ColorSync Utility. Here you see the Quartz Filters that ship with Mac OS X Tiger. You can duplicate and modify these filters or create your own using ColorSync Utility. To create your own Quartz Filter, click the Add (+) button in the bottom left of the window and enter a name for the Quartz Filter. Press the Enter key and ColorSync Utility saves the name of your Quartz Filter. Click the triangle to the right of the name to see the Quartz Filter options. You can assign ICC profiles; convert to a new color space using profiles; apply color effects; change the bit depth, dimensions, and compression; or add comments to a PDF document. Your Quartz Filter can now
be accessed from the Mac OS X Print dialog. Quartz Filters can also be accessed in Automator (see the “Color Workflow: Automation” section). Creating a Quartz Filter with ColorSync Utility.

The access control mechanisms of the system may be further secured by granting administrative rights to only specific users. For each administrative user, there should be two user accounts, one to perform normal user operations, and the other to perform administrative functions. For example, if the user James is a designated administrator he should have a standard system account “james” with no special privileges and an administrative account “admin_james” with administrator rights. This provides accountability where there is more than one administrator on a system. The administrative users should be restricted from logging in to the system from network services using their administrative accounts. This further reduces the risk of the authentication credentials being compromised. To restrict remote access, the configuration of each network service will have to be altered

As previously discussed, at least two profiles are needed for color management to work correctly and predic tably: the source profile and the destination profile. When and how you choose to apply the color conversions to the output profile’s color space will affect how you approach your workflow. Consider the following two scenarios that involve a single-page layout consisting of a photo from one application, vector artwork from another, and a final layout that includes text. If you choose to apply the necessary color conversions to each image and artwork file before combining into a page in a page-layout application—a process known as early binding —the resulting file contains all the elements: graphics, text, and images in an output-ready color space for your chosen output device.

In this method, each element has previously been converted in another application and optimized for a particular output device before being inserted into the final layout. If you need to print this file to another output device, you will need to go back to the original source files to convert the color space and once again place them in your layout. An alternative workflow method is to apply the color conversion to the output color
space on the fly at print time. With this method, images are left in their working space
and ColorSync performs the final color space conversion at print time—a process
known as
late binding
. Whether to choose early or late binding depends on a number
of factors and your preferences. Either method can be used with Mac OS X Tiger.