Over the rainbow

Perfect colour management sometimes seems like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: you can see the way to get there but are pretty sure it does not actually exist. With print technology development continuing to ramp up, machines are becoming more complex while at the same time easier to use. This trend has resulted in a constant stream of new substrates, inks, and coatings, all of which can affect the final colour of the finished output. So, it is no wonder sign-makers are throwing their hands up and claiming matched, calibrated colour across all their machines to be as elusive as a leprechaun.

With all these technological advances press-side, colour management technology is constantly advancing to keep up. This means solutions developers tackle these ever-more complex systems with even more complex algorithms. This leaves many in a state of complete confusion and the solutions sounding totally incomprehensible to anyone without a degree in computer engineering.



However, Toby Burnett, managing director of GMG UK, says advances in the colour management sector are actually more affected by market pressures and changes to the way businesses deal with each other, something that we can all understand.



Burnett explains: “We find a key driver for this is not so much about the technology but about what’s happening in the commercial world. These days, creators or brand owners have a closer relationship with print service providers (PSPs). They are now a little further up the food chain in terms of customer relationship than they were ten years ago.



“Whereas you used to have some-body in that relationship dealing with the colour queries, maybe doing some retouching or profiling on the file, now those people are now not always as active, if they are in the relationship at all. What you’ve lost in the middle is the repro house or the creative service agency to take care of any colour issues.

O Factoid: The International Color Consortium (ICC) was formed in 1993 by eight industry vendors in order to create an open, vendor-neutral colour management system which would function transparently across all operating systems and software packages. O

“Because PSPs now have a closer relationship to the brand owner, they’re taking on more responsibility for the colour consistency. They spend time at the press, making adjustments to colour there and then to give the customer what he perceives he wants. That costs money. You can burn £500 to £1,000 easily by just putting work back on the machine seven or eight times. It’s the commercial environment driving investment in this.”

So, as creative agencies are squeezed out and PSPs themselves become more closely involved with colour management, the solutions available have begun to take into account the PSPs biggest needs.

A loaded Canon

Canon’s European marketing manager, wide-format printing group, Mathew Faulkner, outlines these needs, which come to represent the base-line of both business and manufacturing process. He says: “From a basic point of view it is good practice to have a good colour management workflow in the organisation so as a service provider you can receive files and reproduce those as faithfully as your customers want.

“But I think, particularly as markets such as signage become more customer driven, people are now looking for creative and innovative ways to display their messages. So it’s important that service providers can react to that. This means being able to be flexible on a media side, being able to use a very large variety of media that will satisfy, or maybe some new applications that you want to offer to your customers.

“The ability to be able create your own calibration for media is really key to be able to maintain that flexibility and add new offerings to your portfolio and having that feature in-house is important to be able to maintain the offerings you can give to your customers.”

Faulkner continues, expanding on the processes Canon takes a business through when choosing the right colour management solution for the kind of output they provide: “In terms of the image programme printer line, we split it into a number of ink technologies. We have a five-colour ink technology which primarily services the CAD market, then in terms our graphic arts sector there are six-colour poster printers, and the eight and twelve colours are our photo quality, very high-end printers and it’s on those that we have the option of an in-built spectrophotometer, which is a calibration device.



“There’s a whole variety of them, offline and inline. They use a feature called ‘calibration link’ which is really a software feature. Let’s say a customer has brought in a specialist media they want you to use, you can create an individual calibration for that media, which sets the right amount of ink for that colour. What you see on screen will be very faithfully represented, in the best way in the highest quality possible in the machine. Then there’s an option to share that calibration around with other Canon printers in the same network, producing an identical result.”

Colour sets you apart

UK and Irish colour management software provider Colour Engine is equally concerned with the quality of output from sign-makers and large-format print providers.



Mark Anderton, managing director of Colour Engine, even sees excellent colour management as a tool for businesses to set themselves apart in a saturated marketplace: “Colour quality presents an area where a knowledgeable PSP can clearly differentiate themselves from the competition. In a marketing campaign, brands will expect PSPs to be able to print their logos to very tight tolerances to achieve visual matching across multiple different substrates, but the question is: can they deliver?




“To reproduce accurate logo colours, a lot of work needs to be done profiling multiple devices across many substrates and may come with a steep learning curve but the resulting workflow can be highly efficient. The alternative to this is trial and error proofs being couriered back and forth. With better colour controls comes a faster turn-around of jobs.

“Furthermore, it not just the colour quality. Consistency, predictability and repeatability of these colours are also key factors for the delivery of a full marketing campaign.”



The difficulty arrives, says Colour Engine, the moment the file or image arrives, as colour is one of the elements that can get lost during the creative process. Anderton continues: “Most files supplied to wide-format printers are prepared and separated to Fogra 39L which is a dataset for sheetfed printing, not wide-format. This means that high end colour conversion—repurposing the files to match the actual print process in use—is a huge factor in the ability to deliver good quality wide-format print.

“Colour Engine recommends that such colour conversions are centralised on a dedicated colour server rather than done piecemeal on many different RIPs across a multitude of complex printing devices. Colour servers also take out human error from the production process and can also deliver significant digital ink savings. As technology is moving forward Alwan Color Hub is now able to take any colour space in RGB, CMYK, Multicolour and adapt the file for any print process.”

Making a match

GMG is renowned for its colour management and proofing solutions and, with 30 years of experience under its belt you would expect it to be fully versed in the spectrum of solutions available. Burnett says, however, that often PSPs approach them when they have exhausted other solutions and found them wanting.

Burnett explains: “A lot of our clients have already embarked on some colour management processes by the time they come to us. Their primary motivation for doing that is so that they don’t waste time and money on incorrect output. However, often what they find is two or three months after they’ve gone through that process, the results have changed and the machines are not reproducing the same colour they were when they originally carried out the first profiling exercise. That’s just because of the way the ICC systems work and the RIPs work that they’re connected to.

“Now it’s usually at that point that we become engaged with the client. The reason they would engage us is our different approach the colour management process. Fundamentally, we make the calculation for colour management inside the CMYK colour space. This means that we’re not moving from a cyan and magenta value to lab value and trying to match lab values—we’re matching CMYK values. In this way we have a unique colour engine.”

Burnett adds: “Our colour products are device link systems. This means we link a particular printing device to the colour space we want it to match. We do this by physically changing the CMYK values that are printed on the device so it recreates the intended colour.”

What also sets GMG apart, continues Burnett, is the ability to calibrate different machines from different manufactures, which use different inks and print on different substrates, making a company’s fleet of machines effectively ‘media neutral’. Burnett says: “If a firm has more than two different flatbed presses, printing on two different types of substrate, we can get them all to match. If they have a job that will be printed on two different flatbed presses, typically the whole job will get printed on one, because of the consistency.

“What you often see is people making their next hardware investment based on their last one, because they want to be able to load balance between two presses. What a lot of our customers report back to us is that once they implement GMG’s colour management system, they have a lot more flexibility with regards to how they produce the work because their devices are matched and therefore their output matches.”

Immediate returns

Some may hesitate at the cost of colour management solutions and consider that it is not worth the investment. However, in the end, argues GMG’s Burnett, good colour can often be the difference between keeping a customer or not: “There’s a certain category of clients where it’s all about the colour. Their motivation is about the presence of the product in the market place, and it all comes down to how you recreate their product.

“If the customer is unhappy, mostly that customer goes somewhere else or you reprint it. That has cost you something, either a relationship—the investment that you have to make to go after those customers—which is expensive or, if you reprint it, you’re talking about a few thousand pounds. Every time you do that you’ve lost the money.

“People look to improve their colour management because they want to be more productive. They want to increase the quality of what they are giving to the customer but ultimately they want to be more profitable.”

Perhaps the pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow after all.



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