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Wide-format personnel sometimes joke about almost mystical events involved to migrate precise color from a brochure to a banner or trade-show graphic. Even though everyone can tell a story where magic or luck seemed to be involved, most people know color consistency involves attention to color management, maintenance, and processes.
"It's the process, not the equipment," said Rex Jobe, chairman and CEO of The Color Place, Dallas, TX. "Your UV inks will lay down on a hard substrate different than a solid ink will lay down on a canvas piece. You've got a whole variety of different issues that you have to deal with trying to match. That's where you have to take a reading as to what that output device will give you and then you try to match the color match and the color profiles to produce the colors you want."
Consistent Color Isn't an Accident
It's skill more than magic in the fingers of those in pre-press or the traffic cops in the digital workflow who prep a file so colors are accurately reproduced or sense when "something isn't right" with a run.
"We do printing for clients throughout the US, and I guess our biggest benefit we try to deliver to the client is that consistency," said Randy Crow, president of Source One Digital, Muskegon, MI. "Obviously, that takes good file prep up front. Also, it takes very good pre-flight technicians pre-flighting the file and most of all, the profiles that need to be built for your specific machines that you're running and the media you're running. "
Jim Freed, Source One's vice president of digital services, says they regularly use spectrophotometer, colorimeter, and International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles and calibrate the machines for the media used regularly in-house.
"I think most printers have niches and print on certain materials, and we are the same," Freed said. "We will print on anything, but we have a range of materials that we print on daily and those we really have dialed in. So when get an unusual request for something, like, say, a carpet or something like that, we'll start a profile for that. That's how we manage our system."
Jobe admmitted that profiling is an integral part of consistent color across media. "You've just got to believe in it [profiles] or you don't," he said. "And if you believe in it, you go to the trouble of running the profiles on each of the presses and you read them and know where they are. You run color management on every job."
Common Sense
Wide-format graphics across diverse media is somewhat at the mercy of machines, inks, and media. "The one thing you know about color is that it's not exact," said Jay Buckley, founder of MegaPrint Inc., Plymouth, NH. "It's how close can you get."
Jobe said a machine is only able to do what the ink will do. "I think your biggest issue is that you're dealing with all different sorts of media and your dealing with different ink systems," Jobe said, "so when you're dealing with that, that's your challenge.
Using the science of profiling, experimentation and common sense, most people in the wide-format industry can get their personnel to make output almost magical. Here is some advice about color consistency across media:
Anticipate changes with new media and inks. "Not every banner prints the same," Freed said. "Graphics basically don't print the same. So you want to have consistency in your product."
Crow said some clients expect banners and fleet graphics the same. "Some of that can be printed on a flatbed printer, which is a UV printer. Some can be printed on a solvent printer and by the time it's all said and done, the client doesn't care what you use in your kitchen to cook it. They want that color to be 'right there.' "
A slack take-up system can cause a world of hurt. "Let's face it," Crow said, "Somebody that has a poor take-up system or a spool issue on their media can suddenly throw that color so far off the game."
Know how to deal with anything. "When a file comes in from a new customer, there's always a little bit of exploration to see what they have sent us and the way the people create files," Buckley said. "We get a lot of people who don't even understand what color management means, but there are files from all sorts of programs and there are all sorts of formats like CMYK and RGB files and who-knows-what kind of RGB file...the real trick is to get this so it looks good. If the customer is antsy about a particular Pantone color in his logo or whatever, we'll print out a little one to make sure we hit the color. Honestly, we do very little sending of proofs to people."
A niche can be your friend. Put another way, Buckley said, "In my humble opinion, you specialize or you die."
Processes Make a Printer Seem Magical
Putting out consistent color will make any shop seem like "Harry Potter" works there. But sometimes the magic is knowledge of equipment, supplies, and processes and keeping track of how customers do business.
"We tend to do repeat work for people," said Jobe, who specializes in Internet business, "and quickly, we learned how to do business with each other and how to pretty closely document, with our orders, how each job is done so when we do the next one, we can do it the same way we did the last."
Neal McChristy welcomes feedback about the articles he writes and welcomes suggestions for future topics. Contact him by e-mail at freelance9@cox.net.
author: BY NEAL MCCHRISTY