Colour Software
With colour management acting as such an important part of print and sign-making, Carys Evans asks: “How does the latest software help keep colours consistent?”
Tuesday, 04 Feb 2020 15:32 GMT
Barbara Braun-Metz, chief executive officer, ColorLogic
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Colour management has been around for ages. Even before digitalisation, colour management was necessary to keep colours consistent during reproduction. It was just done manually. Digital pre-press colour management started to grow into daily practice in the early 90s.
Currently, we see an influx of digital presses even in printing areas that use more of a ‘traditional’ way of production such as textile. The dilemma is ensuring prints look the same from the first run to the last and that colours remain consistent if printed weeks, months or even years later. Adding tools to predict and control colours has now become mandatory.
ColorLogic believes in starting with accurate colour measurement data. It is vital to be able to create custom measurement charts, measure colour patches, and to check measurement data before profiling to avoid issues such as mismeasurements or inhomogeneous data.
No matter which solution you choose, up-to-date technology is crucial to address all these new and extended requirements”
The quality of international colour consortium (ICC) profiles depends strongly on the quality of the measurement data used to create them. By adding analysis and optimisation of measurement data, profile quality improves. ColorLogic CoPrA is our ICC profiling solution for any output and DeviceLink profiles for any colour space.
Automated colour management often requires extensive and complex configurations, especially with today’s PDF files. ColorLogic ZePrA Smart Color Server is our solution to create, duplicate and modify configurations and queues for typical tasks in day-to-day production with fully automatic colour processing of PDF or image-based files to any colour space.
Stay consistent
Roland Campa, senior product line manager, EFI
Colour management is about printing the expected, any day, every day. It ensures that there is a proper translation between the job reference and the printer (including a definition for the lighting to be used), so that the job is printed with the expected colours.
The expectation may vary and is job-, use-, market-case specific. Sometimes you want colours to be as accurate as possible. Sometimes you want to boost colours and achieve increased dynamics and saturation for a more visual ‘pop’ without any negative side effects on sensible areas like greys and skin tones.
Hitting brand colours as close as possible is also an important criterion for brand identification. If your brand colours have a different ‘flavour’ each time, customers will perceive your product as low quality, and it might eventually affect the customer’s view on the brand itself. Colour management offers these choices to the user.
If your brand colours have a different ‘flavour’ each time, customers will perceive your product
as low quality”
EFI offers a wide variety of colour management technologies such as the Fiery Color Profiler Suite which creates calibrations and ICC profiles. EFI ColorGuard allows users to set up re-calibration and verification schedules, and EFI Fiery Spot Pro which allows you to reproduce both standard spot colours and custom colours.
Colour management solutions from EFI all seamlessly work together and integrate into our job management tool, Fiery Command WorkStation. These are demo versions for you to try, and licences can be purchased in a modular way, so that your EFI colour management solution can grow with your business needs.
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