1989
During my studies of communications science and technology at the Technical University in Berlin I wrote a book about digital imaging with Amiga computers published 1989 by the publishing house technic support. While writing and producing this book I discovered graphic arts and digital color as a field of my strongest professional interest.
1991-1994
I set up my own business as na in-house troubleshooter for digital publishing and worked for a handful of pre-press companies, printers and Mac dealers in the Berlin area. I began to work as a beta-tester for e.g. AGFA, ColorBlind, Linotype-Hell and Logo. I wrote several articles about DTP workflows for the magazine PAGE.
1995-1997
I decided to write the first German book about color management with ICC-profiles and made a contract with the publishing-house “Springer”. I still worked as a troubleshooter, beta-tester and freelance journalist. While writing the book I discovered numerous color management problems, which resulted in re-writing more or less all parts of the book several times.
1998-1999
The first edition of “Digitales Colormanagement” was finally published 1998 and sold very well. I still worked as a trouble-shooter, betat-ester and freelance journalist. But step by step I concentrated more on color management consulting and individual profile generation for proofing systems and offset presses.
2000-2002
The second edition of “Digitales Colormanagement” was published in 2002. I worked mainly as a colormanagement consultant and did a lot of profiling for offset presses. I also did color management consulting for some high end pre-press companies which dealt with profiles and proofing standards with more than 80 printers in Germany. During my work I noticed huge quality problems in RGB-based pre-press wokflows in combination with individual profiles for different printers.
2003-2005
To serve my customers better in both prepress and printing, I decided that the standardization of printing processes will be the basis for my future color management consulting. I joined FOGRA and the Berlin part of the bvdm, to be better in touch with the players relevant for standardization in Germany. I also begun to plan the third edition of my book with a new focus on standardization and workflow design to avoid color management problems. For the first time I worked for industrial print buyers who had to coordinate photographers, agencies, prepress houses and printers.
2006-2007
Writing the third edition of the book was a nightmare. Especially explaining the pitfalls of color management and strategies to avoid them appeared to be much more complex than I expected. Also the constant testing of new applications and updating of screenshots took a lot of time. I decided to split the book into two parts. The first part is about principles and strategies and avoids screenshots as good as possible. The second part is the step by step implementation of strategies from the first part.
During the preparion of the book I learned the importance of workflow-design and tailor making of profiles. I concentrated stronger on color management workflows with devicelink-profiles to avoid typical problems of traditional ICC-workflows.
Finally in 2007 the third German edition “Digital Colormanagement, principles and strategies” was published. At the end of 2007 I signed a contract for the English translation and started updating this version to the latest developments concerning G7, GRACoL ans SWOP.
2008
The English version of “Digital Color Management” was published.