KYOTO, Japan & AMSTELVEEN, Netherlands—SCREEN Graphic Solutions Co Ltd and CGS ORIS have developed a new technology that promises to save time, lead to better quality printing and meet the growing need for independent color management solutions.
The new CxF spot color matching solution—available for the CGS ORIS CxF Toolbox—is a response to market demands for software that can guarantee color consistency, and enhance efficiencies for new and existing customers.
In the label and packaging industry, spot colors are often used to accurately reproduce brand colors. And it’s in spot color printing in particular that the color exchange format CxF has been recognized for more than a decade as one of the best methods to capture and transmit all the detail in a color. Unlike conventional ICC profiles, CxF data includes the spectral information of the spot color, including halftones and transmittance. This allows for more accurate color calculations and an optimal basis for the precise reproduction of a color at any time.
Generating CxF data is a very lengthy process, however, as it requires charts to be printed and measured for all printing conditions as well as target values to be set.
Printing methods have diversified as digital printers become more widely used. This has led to a need for independent color management solutions that can guarantee consistent color reproduction—even when switching from a flexographic printing press to a digital printing press, or from a digital printing press to another digital printing press.
To meet these market demands, SCREEN Graphic Solutions Co Ltd and CGS ORIS developed a technology that predicts halftones from limited colorimetric data by using a proprietary algorithm. This automatically generates complete CxF data, saving significant amounts of time. This has made it easier for new users to adopt CxF, as well as improved efficiencies for existing users.
More companies can now benefit from CxF’s many advantages. These include a more holistic representation of a color, the best fundamentals for reproducing colors on different printing presses, and flexible and independent color management—regardless of the operator’s skills.
The new technology is available for the CGS ORIS CxF Toolbox—the software solution used to capture, store and edit CxF data in a fast, reliable and safe way. The setup is simple, with the user needing only to present output color charts under certain printing conditions and put the color measurement data into the CxF Toolbox. Once the setup is ready, the system is able to automatically generate CxF data of particular spot colors or entire libraries, without requiring any color expertise. The generated CxF data can easily be embedded in PDF files to be used for a prepress process.
The CxF Toolbox is seamlessly connected to the CGS ORIS Color Cloud, the cloud solution provided by CGS ORIS to communicate all stored CxF data to the entire supply chain. It guarantees authorized users around the world access to complete and up-to-date color data—at any time. Even large amounts of brand’s CxF data can be organized and communicated with the CxF Toolbox and the Color Cloud, including brand owners with collections of more than 200 brands. Read more.
Additionally, the Color Cloud can be used with the entire CGS ORIS Software Suite, like Press Matcher, X Gamut etc, and, of course, can be connected to other workflows and DFEs that work with CxF data.
SCREEN’s newly developed UV inkjet printer for labels, Truepress Jet L350UV SAI, processes PDFs with embedded CxF data, and is able to separate them into up to six colors of CMYK + OB (the feature will be available in early 2021). In combination with CGS ORIS’s multi-color separation technology, X Gamut, SCREEN’s inkjet technology enables the reproduction of spot colors, even with an expanded fixed-ink set in high-quality printing.