Calibration is the cheapest hire.

Here is the cheapest staffing decision a studio can make: hire your printer before you hire your second assistant. A good print lab costs less per year than a junior's first quarter, and it improves every single frame you ship. The assistant improves Tuesdays.

We learned this the expensive way. In 2016 we delivered a knitwear catalogue that looked perfect on our screens and faintly seasick in print — oatmeal reading green, charcoal reading blue. The reprint cost more than a year of calibration hardware, software and lab proofs combined. We have been boring about colour ever since.

The current religion: every screen in both rooms calibrated monthly to the same target, a grey card in every tenth catalogue frame, one lab per city, and a proofing round on real stock before any print run over fifty copies. It sounds fussy. It takes about three hours a month. The Maison Stol season this year produced two colour queries on sixty SKUs, and both were the client's monitor, not ours.

The deeper point is about trust. When a client knows the oatmeal on screen is the oatmeal in the box, the approval calls get shorter, the reshoots stop, and the relationship moves from checking to commissioning. Colour management is not a technical expense. It is a trust accelerator with a sensor attached.

So: calibrate the screens, pick one lab, proof the big runs. It is the only hire that works while you sleep, never leaves for a better offer, and costs less than the reprint you were about to order.

Mara Lindqvist runs retouch and colour at Pinewick Portraits. She calibrates on the first Monday of every month and can tell, blind, which of our two rooms graded a frame.