Indigo Digital Press Color Management

HP (Booth 1825) Indigo has developed a suite of integrated tools designed to simplify and automate the color management process allowing PSPs to maintain color consistency easily and systematically time after time – between presses and between locations. These tools ensure that the exceptional Indigo color accuracy remains consistent and uniform between presses and over time, without laborious manual calibrations.
The HP Indigo Color Management system starts with the media; an Inline Spectrophotometer scans a color chart to describe the individual color space of a specific substrate (the “Media Fingerprint”). The DFE (Digital Front End) then automatically generates a dedicated ICC profile, ensuring accurate color matching of that specific substrate against a given color space, such as FOGRA, GRACoL, ISO 12647-2, or similar. Accurate matching to these industry standards also enables seamless emulation of output from other print technologies (such as offset printing). A three-dimensional look up table (LUT) is then used to regularly calibrate the press, automatically compensating for any variations in press conditions, returning it to the baseline established by the Media Fingerprint. This ensures the color output remains consistent. On web-fed presses this process happens at a pre-determined interval. On sheet-fed presses, the operator is free to determine the frequency of calibrations. Media Fingerprints can be saved and shared between presses, sites and over time, to ensure consistent, repeatable output, regardless of where or when the file is printed. HP PrintOS allows the easy and rapid sharing of substrate Media Fingerprint profiles, via the cloud.