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?