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Color Management: How to Get in the Driver’s Seat

Long-time printing industry professionals know how difficult it is to achieve and maintain great color. Today, customers constantly demand higher quality and more consistency from their print suppliers, which makes color management a critical piece of any successful print business. Fortunately, a few easy steps will take you from feeling out of control to putting you squarely in the driver’s seat for print color management.

Color management processes, tools, and workflows vary from company to company, but they are all designed to bring out the best in each graphic, substrate, and printing device. Printers, presses, and monitors are calibrated to achieve an expected result. Prepress workflows are streamlined, and pass / fail metrics are put in place to verify jobs before they go to press.

These foundational steps optimize performance and accuracy the moment they are implemented, but they don’t control the effects of time. Running jobs, performing maintenance, and even the weather will impact printed color. Still, accuracy is a consistent customer expectation.

Industry leaders control their processes and produce the same high-quality color with consistency over time, taking both color management and profitability to a whole new level. Not only do they calibrate their equipment and streamline their workflows as a part of their color management protocol, they collect performance data over time to decode printer behavior. This enables them to address issues quickly and effectively and achieve superior performance day after day. These pros can anticipate issues before they start and cut crippling color surprises off at the pass.

Accuracy and efficiency are critical to thriving in this industry, because high performance is a widespread customer expectation. While color management practices vary between companies, process control can be applied to any color management system to maintain peak performance. It’s what separates the best from the rest.

Being right once is good. Printing the right color the first time every time is how 21st century pros blow the competition away. They get in the driver’s seat, turn on process control, and leave the past in the dust. Where are you sitting?

 

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Set Your Files Up For Success

Print facilities say their biggest challenges to printing great color come in customer files. No matter how well a printer manages color in-house, the settings used on inbound files will always affect the quality and color of the final output.

So how should print files be set up?

Most importantly: If you have a specific print shop you plan on working with, always follow their artwork guidelines for the best color results. Following a printer’s specs will reduce the pre-press time required to prep your file for printing, saving you time and money. A printer will tell you what they need to get the best results for their process.

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Color Management 101: Color Spaces

Alder-CIE-Chromaticity-Diagram

 

Color Basics

Color is dynamic. We all see it a little differently because color is the physical response of the eye to light + the mental interpretation of those responses. This makes printing color accurately a bit tricky until one has a basic understanding of color space.

First, all color starts with light. The color of a physical object is the result of projected light reflecting off the object. Your eyes + brain interpret what gets reflected, and the result is the color you see. A red apple, for example, reflects red wavelengths of light and absorbs all others. You see the reflected red wavelengths. As ambient light decreases, colors appear to fade because there is less light and, therefore, less color.

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