Color management is more than International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles you load into your RIP or use to view images in Photoshop. In order to have a truly color-managed workf low, you’ll need a color toolbox containing the following six items: A spectrophotometer, light booth, calibrated monitor, Pantone® book, gray balance calibration method, and a loupe to magnify finished prints. This list is by no means all-inclusive, but with these tools you’ll be equipped to produce calibrated, consistent and repeatable color across multiple print devices over an extended period of time.

The goal is to create a process to reproduce the right color every time on any device, anywhere. With this goal in mind, let’s take a look at each of the six tools and break down how each supports a process for reproducing consistent, repeatable color over time on multiple devices.

Tool #1: SpectrophotometerYou need a spectrophotometer because you can’t always trust your eyes when it comes to color. While the human eye can be one of the best tools for evaluating color

difference, it can also be easily fooled. In fact, color measurement instruments such as spectrophotometers are designed to mimic the way human eyes see color without some of the trickery and frailty the human eye experiences.

Both your eyes and a spectrophotometer require an illuminant, an object and a receiver to evaluate or measure color. In the case of your eyes, the illuminant could be the sun and the object could be the grass in your backyard. The receiver would

Jim Raffel, CEO, ColorMetrix Technologies, LLC

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Your Color Toolbox: Solving Process Control Problems with Gray Balance

then be a combination of the rods and cones in your eye combined with your brain. In the case of the spectrophotometer, the illuminant is a light source inside the instrument, the object is typically a color control strip you’ve printed, and the receiver is a combination of photo cells and electronics to process and display standardized color values.

The spectrophotometer creates a tightly controlled environment to measure and evaluate color. This is because the light source is a known quantity, and the photo cells and other electronics are carefully calibrated and contained in a single self-contained enclosure. On the other hand, your eyes are subject to variables that an instrument does not need to address. Simple issues like the colors surrounding the particular color you are evaluating can fool your eyes into seeing two different colors, when in fact the two colors are the same. Additionally, uneven illumination can cast shadows on two colors you are evaluating which can make two identical colors look different. There are also the problems of color blindness and viewing colors when your eyes are tired. In these instances, you can begin to see the importance of a color-measuring instrument like the spectrophotometer.

A properly maintained and calibrated spectrophotometer will always see colors exactly the same way within published limitations of the instrument. The same can’t be said of the human eyes.

Tool #2: Viewing BoothYou need to have a viewing booth, because prints don’t look the same in all lighting conditions. The role of a viewing booth in your color toolbox is to provide a consistent and repeatable light source

for visually evaluating color. Typically, a viewing booth is designed to produce “daylight” lighting, which is also referred to as the D50 ISO standard. D50 is not actual daylight because that varies from hemisphere to hemisphere and from season to season. D50 is instead a standardized version of daylight that we can all use to visually evaluate color any time and anywhere.

However, there are other lighting standards that you need to be aware of because they are most likely used to view finished prints you create. There is a standard for commercial fluorescent or “store lighting.” There is also a standard for incandescent or “home light,” which is changing as we all move toward fluorescent and LED lighting in our homes. Your prints will likely look vastly different when viewed under these different lighting conditions.

Ideally you want a viewing booth that allows you to view samples in multiple lighting conditions. In this way, you can head off color complaints before they happen. It’s important to consider the final use of each print you produce and view the prints under appropriate lighting in your shop before delivering the job.

Tool #3: Calibrated MonitorA color-calibrated monitor will allow both you and your customer to see an accurate simulation of the finished print on screen before you print it “wrong.” Technology does exist to proof your prints on a monitor without using any media, ink or productive time on your printer.

This assumes that your printer has been calibrated using a gray-balance methodology like G7®. By calibrating your printer to a known gray balance, you will print more consistently with or without ICC profiles. You can also apply these same gray-balance curves to images in Adobe applications such as Photoshop.

Once the image is displayed in Photoshop on a color-calibrated monitor, both you and your customer can review an accurate simulation of the finished print before any ink and media is used. The time involved to calibrate your monitor is minimal, and some monitors now have calibration devices built right into them. Also with proper software, calibrating your printer using the G7 method can occur in a matter of minutes, which makes the return on investment attractive for all print shops.

Another common problem with brand colors is matching them consistently over time. You might match the color perfectly

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A properly maintained and calibrated spectrophotometer will always see colors exactly the same way within published limitations of the instrument. The same can’t be said of the human eyes.

one time, but when the client has a reprint or another job with the same colors three months later, you might find that you can’t match what you produced before. This problem can be addressed by calibrating your printer with G7. Once the printer is calibrated, you will then regularly print verification targets to be measured with your spectrophotometer. As long as the verification target passes, you can match printed spot colors without a problem.

Tool #4: Pantone Book In order to produce a piece with prominent brand (spot) colors and not have the client reject the finished product, you need a clear understanding of matching colors with a system like the Pantone matching system (PMS). Your customers may specify a color with a PMS number such as 485 and they have an expectation for what that color will look like on a finished piece. What their expectations are based upon and what your printer is capable of could very easily create a disconnect between expectations and reality.

You also must address customer expectations of what colors you can and can’t reliably produce. One way to do this is by printing your own Pantone chart on your printer with your media and ink. You can then show your client what PMS485 looks like on your printer. If that’s not the exact color they are looking for, they can examine the chart you’ve printed for the correct color. Then, from that point on they will know which color to specify, or you will know which color to substitute, when printing work for them.

Tool #5: G7 MethodIn addition to the benef its a lready explained, when work needs to be matched on multiple substrates, the G7 method of gray balance calibration once again comes to the rescue. For example, when creating a trade show display, it’s not uncommon to be asked to reproduce a company logo or branding image on multiple parts of the booth. Many times those different components of the booth will be printed on different media and potentially by different printing technologies. If, however, all those device and substrate combinations are calibrated using the G7 method, achieving those matches becomes a much easier proposition.

There are multiple software applications available to simplify G7 calibration and all of them follow a very similar methodology to a point. The process starts by printing

and then measuring a ca l ibrat ion target. The calibration target is typically printed through your RIP with all color-management options turned off. After the target is measured with the software, a set of calibration curves is generated. These curves need to either be imported into the RIP or, in some cases, hand typed. The advantage a G7 calibration has over the RIP’s built-in linearization is that the G7 calibrates your device to the CGATS TR015-2013 industry aim points. This means that each and every device you calibrate with G7 produces gray-balance curves as close to identical as possible.

The key to any calibration or color-management process is the ongoing verification and process control step. This is a step many folks skip — and that’s a mistake. By regularly printing and measuring verif ication targets, you will know when your device is no longer producing acceptable color. Some G7 calibration software also includes a verification module that will generate updated (or iterated) calibration curves when the verification measurements made with your spectrophotometer fail.

By closely monitoring and controlling with the G7 gray balance calibration method, you are more often than not going to be producing acceptable color across your fleet of output devices, day in and day out.

Tool #6: Loupes and the Human TouchThere are designers and there are those who produce the art that designers have created. Typically designers are creative and producers are more analytical and scientific in their approach to work. Work style differences lead to varied terminology to describe the same things, and thus there are communication breakdowns. For example, the artist might say that a print is “too warm,” while the printer operator might say that there is too much magenta in the print. Professional level RIP software packages do not contain controls to make a print less warm, but they typically do have controls to reduce the amount of magenta in a print.

Take a little time to work with the designers that submit work to your shop, and frequently provide feedback. Work with them to understand both what they mean and to explain the tools you have at your disposal during production to adjust prints. This would also be a great time to talk about the value of a color calibrated-

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monitor that can essentially soft proof the piece on screen before it’s ever printed.

Sometimes the designer might even come in to approve the work as you produce it. In this case, you could let them borrow your loupe (or magnifier) to see how the print is actually made up of millions of tiny dots of ink. This will help them understand the perils of very small reversed out type and other such print production nightmares.

What’s in Your Color Toolbox?Now it’s time to ask which of these tools you already have in your color toolbox and which ones are missing. Even if you have all the tools, are you using them to create a workflow that makes color reproduction predictable and repeatable? If you’re not, you are leaving money on the table in the form of lost production hours as well as media and ink thrown in the trash — instead of being shipped and billed.

Jim Raffel is the CEO of ColorMetrix Technologies, LLC, a company he co-founded in 1995. As a veteran of the printing industry and a 1986 graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology’s acclaimed printing management program, he had an idea to make color measurement and evaluation easier by creating easy-to-use software solutions. Today he leads a development team that uses the agile development process to deliver cloud-based, cross-platform solutions to both end-users and large original equipment manufactures. Currently his company is partnered with Mutoh to produce the ColorVerify Pro software, which includes the IDEAlliance certified G7® Calibrator module making the G7 method easier than ever for the wide-format inkjet market to implement.