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Most shop owners have experienced machines that are almost like grumpy old men with an attitude, giving output that is awry or clogging up printheads with headstrikes if pushed too hard.
Sometimes it may be temperature or humidity or sometimes it may be the machine needs a little "medicine." A dose of color management through International Color Consortium profiles, calibration and linearization could remedy the machines so they output the same colors on different media again.
About five years ago, the ICC developed profiles that help coordinate application software, raster image processor (RIP) and output devices.
"That whole ICC profile piece," says Dan Halkyard, director of marketing for Océ Imaging Supplies, " really helps to get you more to what I would call WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get]… the big black box right now where a lot of magic happens between what you see on your screen and what comes out of your printer."
Many people say color management is like our late-fall move into Daylight Savings Time. With good color-management practices, you're also going to move your time around a little, but investing time on color management on the front end means saving it later—and saving time on customer complaints, too.
"To one way of looking at, you can't get lazy," says Mark Friedman, marketing communications supervisor for Océ Imaging Supplies. "If you get lazy and not do it, what's actually going to happen is you're going to spend more time reprinting and going back and re-tweaking in [Adobe] Photoshop. So in that respect, you're being lazy on the color management side on the setup side, but you're actually investing more time and more effort during production.
"If you flip that, if you put more effort into color management on the setup and insure your full production workflow is accurate, you can be lazier when you're actually doing your production because it's all set up for you."
Of course, Jonathan Read, digital input specialist for InteliCoat Technologies, says while software tools have made it easier to control color management and output, input is a key component.
"If you have a photographer giving you an image that has a colorcast, you're going to print it and it's going to have a colorcast, so if the input does not look right, that output won't look right," Read says. "Technology has advanced to where we can really control the output, which is great, and it's just informing your customer how to control their input."
The ICC profiles, calibration and linearization are all tools that help color output. Software gives adjustments to make, but operators decide the frequency of checks.
"Using this software, it can actually say, 'Okay, here's where your color was last time and here's where your color is today. Let's try to adjust the way the printer is printing today, because the nozzles are little different and environment or the paper is a little bit different," Halkyard reports. "So you try to get back to the color you had or are looking for. So there are calibration processes that can take place that you might want to incorporate into your workflow. You might say, 'Okay, I've got the great design software and I've got a good RIP. I've got the ICC profiles, but now I need to do this maintenance on a regular basis of some sort or at certain intervals if I change suppliers."
In addition to software, the input device is important. Read says spectrophotometer prices are dropping and that handheld devices work as well as others. He says to look at the Delta E. "It's a difference between what one color is and another color is," Read says, "so if I read the same Coca-Cola red 12 times, each time, my reading is going to be slightly different. So one spectrophotometer might have an average Delta E of .03 and another might have it as one, so if it's the same price, you're going to want to go with the one that has the lower Delta E, which is a more consistent device."
As digital printers increase speed and color accuracy, software will need to keep pace. "What we have to make sure of on the media side is make sure we can keep up with the drying times or the speed of the printers as they're printing, keep up with the improvements in the touted ink color gamut so the media doesn't limit or restrict the performance of the ink," Halkyard adds. "Make sure the coatings are compatible with the inks—that the dot size is about where it should be based on the new ink formula. As that hardware and ink piece changes, it quite often requires changes in the media to accommodate it. So our gig is to try to stay ahead of the curve on that."
Some developments in machines are tantalizing for the smaller shop without a large IT staff. HP is introducing a wide-format Z Series Printer with a spectrophotometer at the printhead that could make ICC profiles obsolete, says Friedman. With everything in the printer, it takes out a lot of the need to thoroughly understand calibration and linearization. "You still know you need to do it, but the printer handles doing a lot of it for you," says Friedman.
Read saw a small-format HP model at the SGIA show and was impressed, saying, "I would say in the next couple of years, everybody's going to have to be doing this, because why not have something automated? You're still going to need to have someone behind the scenes to get the technology to work and everything, but if it helps the end-user get quality products that are consistent every time, that's the whole key here."
Neal McChristy welcomes feedback about the articles he writes and would like to have readers write about future topics. Contact him at 620/232-3724 or at freelance9@cox.net.
author: NEAL McCHRISTY