Print Management Case Study: How One Customer Achieves Global Color Control

A couple of years ago I was working with a well-established company in Pennsylvania that specializes in “museum quality” art and photography books. They were considering several titles for their first Asia production attempt, but the company was concerned the quality that their reputation was built upon would not be upheld by the new contract facility. At the same time, they wanted to implement a color control and monitoring process at their US factory.

The company’s ultimate objective was to bring the proofing of both facilities to within 90%+ of GRACoL 2013 target values using the SpotOn! Visual Match Scorcard. At press we matched the printing color to these accurate proofs. Achieving this goal would ensure their customers continued to receive the same high quality products regardless of where these items were printed, and the company would be able to efficiently control color in two facilities nearly 8,000 miles apart.

This was a job for color experts, so we asked Bruce Bayne from Alder Technologies to spend several days in the Pennsylvania facility and calibrate their new Epson SC9900 proofer. He also installed SpotOn! Verify to bring their quality monitoring and QC assurance procedures to the next level. Moving forward, Verify would be used to control the print process by monitoring and tracking the consistency and accuracy of proofs made in the US and abroad.

Next, the highly skilled Cathay America team used SpotOn! Verify to calibrate and monitor the Epson proofers at the printer’s new facility in Shenzhen, China. Verify’s Visual Match feature guided our calibration work and helped ensure proofers on two continents would match accurately.

Finally, the US based press was calibrated, and the Cathay America team calibrated the presses in China. Both were able to achieve GRACoL2013/CGATS/CRPC6 target values. This was the last step to bring all of the proofing and production devices into alignment.

The next step was to implement a global monitoring and QC assurance system (process control) that would allow our customer to achieve the same high quality presswork over time, regardless of where their books were printed.

Thanks to the support of Bruce Bayne, our China team, and SpotOn! Verify, our customer was deeply impressed by the quality of their first prints from Asia. Both the US client/printer and the photographer whose work we reproduced were thrilled with the quality of the images in this very impressive book. Most importantly, our US client was confident that he could print his high quality museum editions at our China facility.

Since this first successful printing last year, many more titles are now being produced with excellent color. This was possible because of our process control program enabled by SpotOn! Verify.

Details follow:

The printer had 10 fairly new, well-maintained Komori presses, each with an Intellitrax scanning spectro. But the intellitrax software was several generations old and didn’t report anything more that solid ink densities (SID).

This limited color data was simply not enough information to tightly monitor production printing and achieve the accurate and consistent color control that we required. The printed images were quite well known, and our client needed assurance the original images could be reproduced accurately.

We decided to print on a slightly larger press sheet so that we could add a second set of colors bars at the trailing edge of the sheet. One control strip was placed in each of the four alleys of the book pages, just below the Intellitrax scanner’s control strip. These 18-patch, custom color control strips were designed to be scanned by a i1Pro2. After scanning, the measurement data was sent to SpotOn! Verify.

Press proofing key images before the production run. Notice the SpotOn! Version 2 color control strips that run vertically. This allowed for SpotOn! Analyse to measure and display comprehensive printing data.

If the press has shifted too far out of spec, the ink can be leveled accurately by scanning the press color bar with X-Rite’s Intellitrax system. The next step is to scan the custom color control strips in each of the four alleys with the i1Pro2 and SpotOn! Verify to monitor compliance with CGATS21/CRPC6 target values.

Verify clearly displays the data from each scan for the operator to evaluate compliance with the CGATS21/CRPC6 target values. If the press is out of compliance, the operator can take further corrective action to bring the press back into tolerance before running color-critical jobs.