How One Company Mastered the Color Universe

Anderson/LA is a high-profile member of the Consolidated Graphics company. Founded in 1956, in Hollywood, CA, Anderson has a solid reputation for high quality color reproduction. To its expertise in offset printing, the company has added digital print, mailing and fulfillment services, and, most recently, grand-format output of everything from signs and window graphics to billboards and vehicle wraps.

Anderson clients include high-profile companies in the entertainment, hospitality, retail, automotive, and financial sectors. It also works with leading advertising agencies and design firms in a city where design quality expectations are extraordinarily high. Consistency and quality of color output are essential aspects of Anderson’s excellent relationship with major brands.

With Great Color Comes Great Responsibility

From the beginning, Anderson/LA’s color expertise has been a hallmark of its service offerings—a combination of craftsmanship and the emerging science of standardized digital color. Early on, Anderson embraced color specifications such as GRACoL, and qualified for IDEAlliance’s G7 Master printer status in December 2008. As industry standards emerged for a more systematic approach to color, the company has seen them as a potential manufacturing edge.

Earlier this year, George Mendoza joined the Anderson team as director of premedia services. His role included a mandate to make the color quality component of Anderson’s print services even more efficient and reliable, no matter what printing or proofing device is used.

Mendoza views the overall color question as a simple choice between automation and manual operations. “Over 60 percent of the printing companies that care about color quality have to rely on a full-time color guru or hire a consultant to create profiles, calibrate equipment, and tweak jobs for good color results,” he says. “That can be expensive. The alternative is a centralized, automated system, preferably managed via the Web. With dollars for color R&D becoming scarcer, the automated approach makes a lot more sense.”

Grand Plans

The impetus for finding a centralized color solution came in part from Anderson’s growing grand-format business. The company uses four different Vutek UV devices to create a variety of signs, window graphics, and vehicle wraps—often for clients with very high quality expectations. However, Mendoza discovered that the devices’ built-in color management was not able to maintain sufficient color quality or consistency without an undue amount of manual tweaking.

To make matters worse, matching brand colors on grand-format output to those printed on offset or digital presses became a persistent issue. Each device was capable of producing excellent color, but the process of keeping the entire fleet on course, color-wise, was often tedious and time-consuming.

Fortunately, Mendoza’s efforts uncovered an efficient, practical solution: the ORIS family of color management products from CGS.

Superpowers, but no Kryptonite

With support from Anderson and Consolidated Graphics management, Mendoza asked CGS to profile and optimize the company’s array of output devices, beginning with the grand-format UV printers, and eventually affecting multiple output devices.

The results were remarkable. Creating profiles for common substrates, device calibration and other tasks took far less time that they did in a manual workflow—and the time savings translated well to Anderson’s day-to-day operations. “I feel like a color superhero,” says Mendoza. “Tasks that typically took three or four hours manually only took an hour or less with ORIS, and many of these only have to be done once. Now I can easily train someone with far less color expertise to do routine calibration and other tasks that used to consume my time.”

ORIS Press Matcher // Web was especially effective in maintaining the color accuracy and consistency of the VUTEk grand-format devices. Similarly, ORIS Color Tuner // Web was used to manage the company’s three Epson inkjet printers, used to create contract proofs for offset printing jobs. To make sure each device remains consistent, ORIS Certified // Web provides a simple but accurate way to measure any piece, and track the color trend for each device. For the Epson 9900, ORIS Certified uses the device’s in-line spectrophotometer to measure each output—saving even more time.

“What’s impressive about ORIS is the fact that every device is color managed via the Web,” Mendoza says. “A centralized solution gives me an accurate picture of the entire plant—how each device is performing—and alerting me to potential problems before they happen.” ORIS Certified // Web data may be used to precisely plan routine calibration cycles.

ORIS Everywhere

Anderson/LA’s use of ORIS technology also extended to the company’s digital printing operations. For short-run or variable data color print jobs, the HP Indigo 5500 has been a reliable press, albeit with many of the color consistency issues present with the VUTEk and HP grand-format devices. CGS and Mendoza implemented ORIS Press Matcher // Web, with results that Mendoza described as “fantastic. The difference was like night and day.” Indigo color output became consistent with the quality of Anderson’s conventional offset printing.

Not only was the ORIS-managed Indigo output consistent from run-to-run, it also matched color output from other digital presses throughout the Consolidated network, an essential aspect of the company’s service to large, multi-site corporations.

For Anderson’s offset printing operations, another CGS product, ORIS Ink Saver, was applied. Using a unique color transformation process, Ink Saver maintains the highest level of color quality and consistency, while at the same time significantly reducing ink coverage. In addition to cost savings on ink, drying time and the potential for image offset and show-through is greatly reduced. When Mendoza was running tests for Ink Saver, he applied it to one half of a press sheet containing two identical images. The pressman was unable to see the difference in quality, but noticed that the ink key settings for the Ink Saver side were 15 to 20 percent lower than usual.

Administration of the ORIS software is remarkably easy, Mendoza notes, with much of the measurement data from ORIS Certified // Web residing in a Web database. “It’s color management in the Cloud,” he remarks. Training others to use the software has also been easy, and has virtually eliminated the hours needed for manual tweaking.

Shazam!

Although the ORIS implementation at Anderson may seem like magic, Mendoza was quick to note that CGS took nothing for granted during testing and installation. Careful initial profiling and device testing was a joint effort by Mendoza, CGS’ field technical manager, and specialists from CGS partner Fujifilm. (The team installed ORIS Link Profiles into the VUTEk RIPs to apply ORIS color management without altering existing workflows.) “Most printing professionals appreciate the value of great end results,” he says. “The process is important, but at the end of the day, it’s only the finished product that matters. Despite the comprehensive nature of this project, the process of testing, installing, and deploying ORIS throughout the plant was very smooth.”

Mendoza is now in the process of creating color samples for his sales team, using the same color images on every possible substrate, including plastics as well as paper from both digital and offset presses. “Our sales team is very excited,” he says. “Our ability to maintain an even greater color consistency than in the past throughout our entire fleet of very different devices is a big competitive selling advantage. Anderson, like all of Consolidated Graphics’ companies, is a high-value print supply chain partner. ORIS is part of that value.”

John Parsons is a writer, researcher, and analyst in the printing and publishing industries. He writes and advises on a variety of technology and business topics, including Web-to-print, digital color, on-demand, premedia workflow, and print-to-mobile (QR Codes). He writes for several industry publications, and is the former editorial director of The Seybold Report. Contact him at [email protected].

SIDEBAR

An important aspect of Anderson/LA’s value proposition, when it comes to color quality, is its role within the entire Consolidated Graphics enterprise. “For national brand clients, having consistent color at every location is one of the big reasons companies rely on Consolidated,” says Cory Sawatski, the company’s director of operations technology. “Each of our plants has a variety of production quality digital presses—many times from different manufacturers. Using ORIS has enabled us to consistently fulfill that promise of high quality, consistent color anywhere in the country.”