This works well enough in offset printing where there are well-established standards and the inks are manufactured accordingly. But the reality is much more chaotic in the inkjet market, and particularly with wide-format. 

For a start, there are several ink technologies to master and some of these may use white or varnish as well as light colours and expanded gamuts. The instant curing nature of UV printers means they are generally more tolerant. But when it comes to solvent and latex printers it can be tricky to get the right balance of ink and heat to produce good colours that dry on the printer. 

Colour management is all about being able to get this balance right first time, without wasting time, ink and media on trial and error. It should allow for consistent results, so that the colours match even if you have to switch printers at the last minute, or if you later have to reprint part of a job. 

To achieve this you’ll need profiles for both the printer itself and for the media, though Toby Burnett, managing director at GMG UK, warns that the gamut can still be clipped if the printer can’t reproduce the necessary range. In addition, you’ll need a separate profile for each change in resolution or speed. 

Most media vendors produce ICC profiles for their own media; however, Dean Derhak, product director at SA International (SAI), says that you can get better results if you make your own, which will take into account the specific environmental conditions around your printer such as humidity and temperature. He adds: “The media vendors will set the ink usage as high as possible to get the most saturated colours.” This offers a significant potential saving, as many RIPs will now include some form of ink optimisation that can cut ink usage down by up to 30% while tailor making your own profiles should improve this even further.

The bad news is that it does take time to make a good profile – typically half an hour to an hour depending on the software involved. But the RIP vendors have worked hard to make this process easier, with many now offering a ‘wizard-driven’ process. Claes Jeppsson, general manager for Onyx Graphics Europe, says: “You don’t need to be an expert, just to understand the questions it asks, such as what quality you want to achieve and whether you are using bi-directional printing.”

Jeppsson says that most people start off using the supplied profiles but want to make their own as their operation expands, adding: “Typically when they get their first flatbed, which often comes with someone more senior to run the print room.” 

Derhak points out that some printers, such as the HP Latex 300 series, do include calibration tools. But in most cases you’ll need your own spectrophotometer. There are quite a few to choose from with X-Rite and Barbieri being the most popular in wide-format. The device will need to be able to handle the range of substrates typically found in wide-format, including transmissive surfaces such as backlit media, and it is better if it can read the test chart in one pass to relieve the tedium of measuring the many hundreds of patches necessary to make profiles. Spectrophotometers should be serviced regularly – ideally once a year – depending on the manufacturer’s specifications. It goes without saying that you’ll need a good monitor as well and that this should be kept calibrated. 

The front-end

Another problem facing wide-format users is that most dealers will bundle a RIP with a wide-format printer so that most users will quickly find that they have several individual RIPs, each driving a different printer. Many of these RIPs will offer some form of colour management but you will get more consistent results by using a single RIP to colour manage all the individual printers. Many RIPs will drive more than one printer, though in most cases you’ll have to buy additional licenses or drivers and will probably need additional workstations or else the sheer volume of processing will slow down performance. 

Most RIPs offer the ability to handle ICC profiles, although often it’s an optional extra. Caldera does include full colour management capability within all its RIPs through its Easy Media module, which enables anyone with a spectrophotometer to make their own ICC profiles. Eric Mendiharat, Caldera’s sales director for the EMEA region, explains: “Caldera integrates the X-Rite i1 Prism colour engine, which is used in software like X-Rite’s own i1 ProfileMaker.” He says it’s easy to use, adding: “We wanted to make it so that people without a high level of knowledge could make an ICC profile.”

Another popular option is Onyx Graphics’ ProductionHouse, which can drive up to four printers. It has a number of modules for handling colour and features including the ability to create ICC profiles, optimise profiles for ink savings and deal with white and clear inks. Onyx also has a Connect module that uses JDF ticketing to communicate with an MIS. 

SAI sells the Flexi range, which includes both design and RIP features in one suite. The top of the range, FlexiSign Pro and the subscription version, also include as standard the ability to make and manage ICC profiles via a wizard-driven system that walks users through the process, including printing a calibration chart, setting the ink limits and then building the profile. 

Workflows

Modern RIPs include a number of file preparation features and some have now evolved into full-blown workflows. Thus Onyx, for example, has developed Thrive, which has most of the same features as ProductionHouse, but can drive an unlimited number of printers so that it’s easier to centralise pre-media, including colour management. Jeppsson says that Thrive has a modular approach, separating the pre-media from the printing, which better reflects how print shops are organised.

Meanwhile, Agfa has developed Asanti, which borrows heavily from its Apogee workflow. Asanti includes Agfa’s proven colour management so that jobs can be set up once, and then the results output to various printers, including both Agfa and non-Agfa printers. It comes with a standard set of production set-ups with calibration curves and profiles that can be combined with different print modes, which Agfa claims delivers good print quality out of the box. These profiles can then be further tweaked without the need to print out thousands of colour patches – handy if you have to use different substrates. 

GMG also has a dedicated wide-format workflow, ProductionSuite. Again, it’s a modular system with a separate RIP and Editor for file preparation. It can match colour output across multiple devices, including handling spot colours to match the media in use. It includes GMG’s Smart Profiler and there’s an EcoSave function, which tweaks the supplied media profiles to reduce the amount of ink used while still delivering the same colour gamut.

Mixed environments

So far we’ve mainly considered managing colours across wide-format printers but many people work in mixed print environments with offset and screen printing as well as wide-format, which means trying to match colours across a much wider range of substrates and ink types. 

Thus GMG also sells ColorServer, which acts as a centralised hub that is able to handle the demands of these different processes. It includes a number of modules for features such as ink saving as well as SmartProfiler, for building profiles. Burnett says that customers with mixed environments such as offset and wide-format tend to go for ColorServer, while people with multiple wide-format printers tend to buy ProductionSuite. 

Esko also has solutions for working in mixed print environments. There’s a new Colour module for the Automation Engine workflow. Dan Pulling, business development manager for Esko, explains: “It allows customers to standardise their colour across all their different devices including digital and offset presses.” 

Esko also has an ink saving module, that works by altering the mix of cyan, magenta and yellow relative to the black inks. Pulling adds: “People will set up their devices so that they won’t over-ink that substrate, to make sure that the ink is able to dry, and then once we have that we can try to reduce how the separations are built up to reduce the amount of ink that we need.” 

The days when colour management was considered one of the dark arts are long behind us. It can take time to build a good set of profiles, but the savings in ink and media should more than compensate. However, the biggest advantage lies in producing consistent, predictable colour across different printers and on a wide variety of substrates. Burnett concludes that as the market for general print shrinks, so customer expectations go up and the ability to match colours accurately will become more critical. 

Case study: Digital Factory

Digital Factory, based in Woking, has been using GMG’s ProductionSuite workflow for the past 18 months. The company does a range of work including exhibition displays, packaging mock-ups, fabric displays, vehicle graphics and wallpaper. 

Initially, pre-press manager Rob Foster says that he was looking for a better way to automate the workflow around a Kongsberg XP44 cutting table but realised that ProductionSuite could also drive all the printers. These include two Durst UV printers - an R320 and a P10-160 - as well as na HP Latex 360 and a DesignJet Z6100.

However, Foster says that the workflow had other benefits, adding: “I did notice a big improvement in the colour with GMG because it does the profiles in a different way so we get a purer colour output.” 

Foster uses a Barbieri Spectro LFP and says it takes less than half an hour to make a profile. The profiles do drift over time, but Foster says that it’s a simple five-minute process to correct for this: “We can print out an A4 chart, read it back through the Barbieri and it puts it back to the golden state.”

Foster concludes: “I would personally say that it’s been good value for money. I think we get fantastic colour output in comparison to what we used to.”