NASHVILLE, TN—Aiming to help the packed room at Toolbox Tuesday, Part III get a grip on any color related problems plaguing their print operations, session chairs Kevin Bourquin, of Cyber Graphics, and Bjorn Knutson, of FTA, assembled a trio of knowledgeable speakers to deliver anecdotes, suggestions and guides to go “From Color Mayhem to Color Control.”
Al Marquardt, of Kimberly-Clark Corp. and current chairman of the FFTA Board of Trustees, began with a plan to avoid said mayhem. He illustrated the importance of brand colors by asking the audience to name the color associated with a number of CPCs like Starbucks and Pepsi. He also noted consumers come to rely on specific colors on packaging, to provide information and speed up shopping time.
But when it comes to the most important set of eyes within his operation, Marquardt was frank and said it’s the marketing department who he defers to when it comes to deciding to use a spot color or attempt to work with process colors and pocket the resulting cost savings.
How to manage color and avoid mayhem? It’s critical that art agencies, prepress employees and printers are all on the same page with respect to where the product is printed and what printing process is being used. Everything starts at the design level, and it’s important a designer knows whether a specific color is hard to hit. Marquardt showed a number of actual prints—some on store shelves—with widely varying colors.
Offering some points to avoid mayhem, Marquardt gave those listening a plan:
- Understand how to treat customer brand colors
- Ensure the supply chain knows about effective measurement tools, expectations and tolerances
- Know what information is critical to manage and control the entire graphic process through printing
- Communicate well with agencies involved
John “The Math Guy” Seymour from QuadTech spoke second, highlighting use cases for the “M” conditions for spectrophotometers. Going over the four “M” conditions, he posed a few questions to help determine which flavor to use:
- Do you have OBAs?
- Are you only interested in process control?
- Do you want CIELAB values?
- Are you measuring wet ink?
As a failsafe, he advised that all devices in a given supply chain should use the same “M” condition.
Seymour then segued into color profiles, looking at things to consider before clicking the “Let’s make a profile” button. He looked at several examples of color measurement data and poked the audience to consider whether or not the resulting graphs looked “OK” before generating a profile. “Real world data is not clean,” he concluded.
Finishing Part III was Heath Luetkins, from CGS Publishing Technologies International LLC, to discuss device link as compared to ICC and CxF. He used an analogy of a GPS to draw a parallel to color management: Whether using Google Maps, Apple Maps or another route provider, you’re going to the same place.
Luetkins went over the pros (ability to preserve pure colors, control of rendering intent) and cons (unidirectional, can’t be embedded into an image) of device link profiles, before providing a reason why a flexo operation might use it. Turning to CxF, he gave an overview of a typical workflow and deliverables to expect at various stages, including the brand owner, designer and printer.