Managing Color Expectations Across Print Platforms

Color management is critical to ensuring PSPs and their customers are aligned on what the final product will look like.
| Credit: Shutterfly

With the steady rise of convergence across the printing industry, it’s common for print service providers (PSPs) to offer a range of solutions to their customers. From wide-format to direct mail, commercial printers have expanded their reach to give customers a “one-stop shop” type of experience.

“Years ago, printers were more specialized,” Joe Marin, senior vice president, member services, at PRINTING United Alliance, says. “You had printers that just did wide-format. You had printers that were just digital. You had printers that were just commercial offset. And in order to survive, printers have had to bring all that in-house, because what they were finding is they’re having to outsource. And it’s like, ‘Well, wait a minute, I can keep this money in-house if I purchase the equipment, get some expertise on staff that knows how to operate this equipment, etc. I don’t want to say it’s ubiquitous now, but it pretty much is; printers have to do it to survive.”

Already, printers must account for ink type, pigment loads in the ink, substrate, white point, and more when managing colors. With a range of print platforms added to the mix of variables, managing color can become a bit of a challenge.

“It is so difficult to match at times because all of the print technologies have their own capabilities and they’re designed to do different things, and they’ve got their own benefits,” Jordan Gorski, executive director at Idealliance, says. “If you go to look at a commercial printed offset piece next to a toner piece or an inkjet piece or something like that, they’re producing their print with very different technologies.”

Marin likens the differences between platforms as so variable that “it’s not even apples and oranges. It’s apples and desk lamps.”

“What you’re producing … on signage versus on a mailer versus on a catalog versus on packaging is all going to be produced using completely different processes,” he adds.

What Customers Expect

The colors that can be achieved on different print platforms, such as the HP Indigo 100K seen here, can vary widely, making color management an absolute necessity. | Credit: Shutterfly

Shutterfly, based in San Jose, California, serves three types of customers, all of whom have different color expectations, says John Reinert Nash, principal color scientist at Shutterfly.

According to Reinert Nash, its consumer business and professional photo business are more about getting a certain look. With consumers, he says color management is “based on pleasing color, based on making the product look as good as it did on your screen.” Expectations for professional photos are similar, with the goal being “to make it look as good as it did in the analog photo days,” despite using ink on paper.

On the other hand, Reinert Nash says that the commercial expectations are all about color accuracy rather than general appearance.

“There is where we’ll print to a standard such as G7 or GRACoL, and there the brand owners will care very much about their brand color,” he says. “So, ‘Is this the right blue? Is this the right orange?’”

Education Is Key

While every PSP wants to meet the needs of its customers, clients must be aware that some color standards are not attainable. To mitigate any disappointment this may cause, Marin cautions against saying “match” when talking with clients, suggesting the word should be entirely removed from the discussion.

“Printing is not an exact match process; printing is a color reproduction process,” he explains. “If you look up the word reproduction in the dictionary, a reproduction is not an exact match. A reproduction is a likeness, it’s a close facsimile. So color matching — and a match by definition is exactly the same — from one device to another is almost impossible. What we can do is reproduce color very accurately from one device to another, but an exact match in most cases is an impossibility.”

Marin suggests weaving this information into conversations with customers, especially since “the best relationships with customers begin with educating them,” he says.

Gorski seconds the importance of education. Not only can it prevent expectations from getting too lofty, but it can make the actual color management process easier for both parties. For instance, if a customer wants to transfer a design they used on social media to a printed piece, knowing more about what to expect from a printed piece will enable them to think about color from the very beginning of the design process.

“Educating them on that and how to best incorporate color management into their workflows is important,” Gorski says. “They’re going to get the most bang for their buck at the same time, and they’re going to eliminate as many headaches in their own day-to-day basis by really setting the expectations on what they want [the colors] to look like. Sometimes, that takes a printer educating their customers and saying, ‘You know what, this looks great, but this is designed in RGB. It’s going to look very different when you convert it to CMYK.’”

Color Management Tips

Once a customer is on the same page as the PSP, they need to meet the expectations that have been set. The best way to do this? Marin says there must be a consistent process to manage colors across any job.

“The foundation is process control and calibration,” Marin says. “It’s getting your equipment — getting all of the equipment that you’re printing color on — to reproduce color to a baseline so that you’re always printing the same, same, same.”

Marin says this can be achieved on most devices. However, some devices are a lot more inconsistent.

“If you have devices that are constantly changing over time, they’re not even worth calibrating because you’re constantly chasing that baseline,” he says.

On a positive note, he says PSPs will encounter few of these devices, and even fewer in the future.

Reinert Nash says Shutterfly also builds calibration into its customer success process to make sure that those team members are seeing the same thing as everyone else.

“For professional [businesses], we will use a spectrophotometer to calibrate those monitors and make sure that all of the agents are seeing the same color, because they are making color judgments on the screens or making adjustments,” he says.

Even with calibration and consistency, Marin advises — just like PSPs should for customers — the goal isn’t to get an exact match across different platforms.

“This device over here may be reproducing color [at one level] — same, same, same,” he says. “That’s a good thing. This device over here may be reproducing color at [a different] level, but it’s still same, same, same. Now these two devices, if you take color off of both of them … when you put the two together, they’re not going to look the same. That’s OK, that’s what color management does. Color management takes what those devices can print consistently and gets the color to reproduce more accurately.”

Color Management Resources and Tools

Attendees at a legacy G7 training session get hands-on experience with color management. | Credit: Idealliance

As Reinert Nash mentioned, using an industry standard to manage colors is helpful when printing across different platforms.

“For the commercial business, we are often asked to hit a standard like GRACoL and prove that we are G7,” he says. “So, since we’re using some of the same presses for both the consumer and the commercial work, it is convenient to run our presses in a G7-compliant mode. When you get into some of these other non-press platforms like the wide-format inkjet or the dye-sublimation or the textiles, we’re usually not graded on whether we’re G7, but we generally will calibrate to a condition that is either G7 or close to passing G7, because that’s just a great foundation to build a profile on top of. It makes the neutral scale pleasing and we can go from there.”

G7 color management was launched in 2005 and has now become a global standard, Gorski says. In March, PRINTING United Alliance announced it was enhancing the legacy methodology with the release of G7+ training and certification to meet the evolving needs of the printing industry — including the use of multiple print platforms.

In addition to complying with industry standards, Marin points to the iLEARNING+ platform as a wealth of knowledge for those who want to learn more about color and color management. Specifically, he says the “How to Evaluate and Communicate Color” course teaches PSPs how to communicate color effectively within their organization, as well as with their customers.

During a training session for the legacy G7 calibration, attendees learn more about the platemaking process. | Credit: Idealliance

Also available through iLEARNING+ are a series of Color Management Professional Certifications. PSPs can get certified on the basics, on a specific print platform, or even kick it up to the master-level certification. Other certifications focus on color management in prepress, sales, and design. Marin says receiving these certifications is “the next building block” for printing across platforms and across different facilities. The final building block would be to become certified as a G7+ expert.

Reinert Nash says that color management has been made easier by technological advancements in data management.

“All of our color data is in the cloud, so it’s straightforward for me to share,” he says. “And then, an increasing number of our partner fulfillers also have their data in one of the many cloud systems, and it’s getting easier for them to share just what they print for Shutterfly. … At Shutterfly, if I have the same product printing in three plants, it needs to be the same, consistent good every time we print. I’m in Minnesota and our plants are in Texas, Arizona, and South Carolina, so I can’t be on the floor looking at the sheets coming off the press. So I rely on the measurement and a dashboard.”