Color Management Essentials for Wide-Format Printers

Matching a brand color can be critical to winning projects from clients. But to achieve that objective, wide-format print providers must ensure they have set up the right processes and systems. In the following pages, we will examine what PSPs need to know about effectively implementing color management on their projects.

The importance of doing so cannot be overstated, said Ray Cheydleur, printing and imaging product portfolio manager, Grand Rapids, MI-based X-Rite. “Studies show color influences consumer behavior,” he said. ”Brand owners are holding printers to tighter and tighter color management requirements. Regardless of who or where an item is printed worldwide, brand owners want color consistency and accuracy.”

Toby Saalfeld, US director for color management with Ricoh USA, Inc., agrees on the crucial importance of color management.

“To be successful, it’s important for printers to consider color management as a part of a chain of events for each and every print job,” he said. “It’s an important link to the overall workflow, and without it everything else will fall apart.”

In the pages to follow, in teachings imparted by four different experts, you will learn how to achieve those color management qualities for yourself and your customers.

Implementing Best Practices

For wide-format printers as well as commercial and packaging printers, the challenge can be matching color from device to device, Cheydleur said.

“Different devices often use different substrates, inks and coating. You also need to consider things like monitor-to-output matching issues that require that both monitors and output devices are property profiled and calibrated,” he said.

Implementing best practices and standard operating procedures along with the right color management tools can help printers achieve consistent and accurate color.

“It also minimizes color errors,” Cheydleur said. “First, you need to start with good communication. All stakeholders should be working with calibrated devices, monitors, local proofers and output devices. This requires ICC color management software and a spectrophotometer for print profiling. This provides for proper expectation setting right from the initial creation stage. If you are matching a specific target or brand color, use well-qualified color references like the Pantone Matching System. [The system] has both physical guides and digital references to help both designers and printers. If you need to match with offset, and offset is using a standard reference profile, then making sure all devices are targeting this final output space right from the start is also critical. Training and qualification, such as the Pantone Certified Printer program, which looks at the entire print communication process, is a simple way to make sure all parts of the workflow are aligned.”

It’s worth noting color management is about more than pulling and measuring sheets, he adds. For process color work, wide-format printers target either specific industry specifications or a space defined by the gamut of their output device. In either case, an ICC workflow in prepress and in the RIP is required. For both four-color devices and those with extended color devices, it is critical to understand the gamut by building a custom profile of the device that represents both inks and media.

“The next step is to ensure that each person is working from the same accurate and reliable specifications in prepress/premedia. If you are working with inkjet proofs, you will need to validate the proof against an ICC profile representing the press condition that the job will be run to,” Cheydleur said.

“Colors defined as spot color inks need to be measured and compared to the final output capability. In some cases, the customer will provide an analog physical standard to match, but for more consistency, brand owners are increasingly providing digital standards to match. For the most accurate color workflow, digital standards such as those in the PantoneLIVE cloud-based library of spectral values, will provide specifications that can travel with the job through the entire workflow.”

Properly calibrating and profiling the press is also critical, as is use of a spectrophotometer for measuring color throughout the process, he said. Printing to standards, and hitting customer spot colors, requires you look at the color values.

As color is perceived differently under different lighting, pressroom and premedia personnel should also have access to a light booth for viewing color under controlled lighting conditions. “With all of these elements in place, the pressroom is on the path to great color,” he said.

“The final step in ensuring that color is right the first time, right every time is a statistical process control using a solution such as ColorCart that enables real-time monitoring of production. It includes a scorecard that can compare performance of operators, presses and multiple sites; linkages to PantoneLIVE and many MIS systems, and more. With all of this in place, a printing operation will have an unrivaled end-to-end color-managed workflow that extends to all stakeholders and results in reduced waste and rework, as well as improved profitability and customer satisfaction.

Precision and Accuracy

When regarding color fidelity on an output device, two considerations must be top of mind, said David Hunter, principal with Forest Lake, MN-based Pilot Marketing Group, a 22-year-old enterprise chartered to help companies make the transition from graphic arts to manufacturing companies. Those twin considerations are first, precision or consistency of the device, and second, the accuracy of the device.

“When we’re talking about hitting a brand color, it must be within a customer’s e-factor, or their expectation factor for a color match,” Hunter said. “Every customer has a different expectation of a color match, so we want to quantify what that e-factor is for that customer, and ensure our manufacturing device has an equal to or less-than e-factor for that customer. If you do that, expectations will be met.”

Customers pay only if their expectations are met, so it’s important to know whether a device is capable of meeting the expectation before 400 copies are printed, Hunter said.

“At our Chromachecker.com website, right on the front page of the site is a button that measures the e-factor. We give you a set of memory colors and ask if you would accept the difference. The result is a number one through nine, which is your e-factor. So through our Chromachecker website, we can help that customer determine whether a device is appropriate for their needs, based on the customer’s e-factor.

“And we can also determine whether it is appropriate for the vendor to sell to that customer, based on what the device can do. Knowing what the device is able to do upfront saves a lot of pain and heartache later on. We can do a factory-authorized test, which ensures it. A print service provider will lose more money on a rejected job, compared to the profit they will make on nine jobs the customer accepts.”

Color management is often misunderstood, and one way to cut the confusion is to identify the five Cs of color management, Hunter feels. The first C is a color capture device, measuring color. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t quantify it,” he said.

The second C is calibration, or the aspect of making the device repeatable and being able to provide consistency and precision. The third C is characterization, the aspect of building an ICC profile. Once the device is repeatable, an ICC profile can be built that defines the gamut, or the range of color the device is capable of producing.

“By doing that, you can know what brand colors the device can print, and which it can’t,” Hunter said. “You must have these three steps in place to do this.”

The fourth C is the convergence C, which refers to how brand color is converted into the physical device. And the fifth and final C is conformance. “That said my printer is printing precisely and printing accurately,” he reported.

“A lot of my large-format guys measure it at least once a shift. If they get a green badge, they go ahead and print, and if they get a red badge, they know they have a problem and don’t print.”

Precision and calibration go hand in hand, as do profile and conversion.

If there is a problem, it is either in the precision/calibration or in the profile/ conversion aspect, Hunters said. If in the former, it’s typically in the mechanics of the device, and if it’s the latter, it’s in the RIP. “Just knowing where to look is 90 percent of the problem,” he adds. “We have a test that can allow them to make that determination, and that allows them to go in and fix the problem.”

Hunter believes most print providers print “any way, any day.” But if they want to be competitive, moving forward, they must do so on more than price, and color fidelity is a great way to display a competitive edge that eliminates need to compete on price.

“If you print any way any day, you should understand it’s much harder to print the same way every day,” Hunter said. “But it’s even harder to print to a standard every day. That gives you a competitive advantage when you say you can print to G7 on all devices. That’s a standard that accommodates any device, any substrate, any ink. You will share a consistent appearance with any other device in the world that prints to G7 for a shared visual appearance.”

Gotta Know Your Limitations

The first thing any PSP must know is his or her own limitations, Saalfeld said. “For example, if a printer can only support CMYK, they’ll only be able to use about 60 percent of Pantone colors, meaning limitations right off the bat,” he commented.

“If customers require a larger color subset – like orange or green – or lighter pigments – like magenta or cyan – the PSP will need a printer offering a larger color gamut. This knowledge ultimately translates into better service for customers and more business for the shop. It’s also important to know there’s only so much one can do as a PSP. This is why being aware of capabilities and benefits of color management is such a useful knowledge base. For example, if a customer file that’s received is not very high quality, it’s important to recognize that upfront so that new ideas and options to overcome the original quality issues can be developed and shared with the customer. These ideas can either help them get close to their original vision, or offer an alternative that would have more consistency across the job.”

Classroom Approach

Print service providers need to understand three important issues. The first is that color is a science and a technology. “You have separations and those separations make up the gamut of what the output device can produce,” said Lloyd Carr, professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) College of Technology, in Brooklyn, NY.

“The scan is taken in an RGB mode. All scans and all photos are in RGB mode. We convert it from RGB into CMYK. Whoever the authors of the software, no one has been able to manage color in its conversion from RGB to CMYK. That’s a bold statement. But unfortunately, we have had to use work-arounds like gray component replacement, which means from the conversion from RGB to CMYK, separations such as cyan coming to red, and red is not made of cyan.

“It is made from magenta and yellow. So that gray comes in and we have to take it out in order to keep the color clean. If we don’t take out that gray component, our colors will be inconsistent.”

The second issue is device color profile. Any device, such as a wide-format output device, a monitor, a smartphone or a printing press, has a color profile.

“We can actually look them up in the software we use,” Carr said. “We want to manage something that is closest to the output device we’re using.”

The third consideration is that to be effective, designers and producers need to realize what spot color is. “The acronym PMS is what we call spot color, but it’s not,” Carr said. “It is only if you buy and license the Pantone matching number, which you can’t do in all media, because not all devices are compliant . . . You have to see if your output device has that brand number in its ability to output. You have to see if that spot color is equivalent in a medium’s color model.”

Carr noted there are many high-fidelity output devices. Because they can output in high-fidelity color, the amount of color they can reproduce is increased. “There are devices that can output hexacolor,” he said. “Those six separations are specifically designed to output the illusion of spot colors. But you have to know what your device can do. Is it a high-fidelity device, or is it a hexacolor device? Or is there a separation, where I can take a spot color, buy a container of a PMS color, put it into the device and print that color? Some devices can do that, but you have to know what your device is.

“That’s everything PSPs must know about color management. Know these things and they know what they can manage. They must identify their output device, its color profile and the specific color gamut – the amount of colors a device can output.

“Then they’re good to go.”