It’s not every day you’ll overhear a group of guys discussing at length, in their broad ‘saf Larndan’ accents, the latest cosmetics to hit the department store counters. Clinique’s new range of pink, shimmery lip glosses, Estée Lauder’s new ‘party season’ eye-shadows and Dior’s ‘natural glow’ foundations – all topics your average self-respecting bloke would, you might assume, avoid in conversation as fiercely as wearing these products.

But in fact, there’s one group of men who actually pride themselves on being experts in this field. They are the 38-strong team at Peckham-based Tower Printing, and the reason they know so much about the latest shades, is because it is their job to ensure that these colours are perfectly recreated on cosmetic POS displays.

"For a bunch of ugly men printing in Peckham, we’re quite good at our cosmetic products," chuckles director Gavin Jones, who adds: "Cosmetics do have very strict brand colours, and a lot of the time the colours are very hard to get just right. We’re doing a campaign for Clinique at the moment, for example, that has a very vivid pink on it and it’s very hard to match."

Considering how vital to Tower Printing’s success colour matching is, it might come as a surprise, then, that the company, established 30 years ago as a litho house but diversifying into wide-format, digital, cross-media and design after a management buyout seven years ago, only invested in wide-format colour calibration software in July this year.

This was because there just didn’t seem to be many wide-format colour calibration packages on the market before GMG launched its ProductionSuite, reports Jones. "We did have a bit of a look around but I didn’t see anything else that would do that same thing," he says. "I would say there wasn’t any system for doing this before."

So when Jones became aware of the new ProductionSuite in June, he knew it was time to invest. "We were finding that there were some colour discrepancies," he says. "All the RIPs that came with the machines had colour management switched on, but they weren’t doing the job accurately. So we were colour matching purely by eye."

This set-up might be okay for printers with just a couple of machines, says Jones, but Tower Printing’s extensive wide-format kit list really does make colour calibration software a ‘must’. "We’ve got an Océ Arizona 350GT UV flatbed, two HP Latex 25500s, two HP Z6100s and four HP Z6200s," he says. "We print a wide range of media on them, from photo-paper to vinyl and PVC, and those different substrates are used in close proximity to one another in the retail environment."

Happy customers
Installing the software has certainly paid off, then, in enhancing relationships with existing customers and in lending extra authority to new business pitches.

"I think we’ve cemented relationships with customers," reports Jones, "but it’s also a bit of a sales tool as well. For example, I’m in talks with an agency at the moment and the first thing they asked me was what I did for colour management. If I’d have said we don’t do anything, I’d have been on the back foot straight away. But when you say ‘we have GMG and we’re running to Fogra 39 standard,’ suddenly everyone goes ‘okay fine’ and they’re not worried anymore, that’s all they wanted to hear.

"The GMG has a spot colour matching tool where we can print a whole swatch that’s around that colour space and then we can get a printed-out table and choose the colour we want," adds Jones of how the system works. "And you hit the picker and say ‘from now on anywhere that colour appears, it has to match this’."

But it’s not only the colour management side of the software that has contributed greatly to enhancing Tower Printing’s wide-format offering. A really valuable bonus, says Jones, is the ProductionSuite’s Editor module, with the most handy feature of this being a tiling functionality.

"Where you’ve got a big wall installation, it allows you to easily split the artwork down into the individual pieces," says Jones. "That was always something that was fiddly to do in InDesign because you had to make lots of different pages up, whereas in this software it takes seconds to draw the lines across to where you want them, so it speeds up production of this kind of job."

And the editing tool also makes changing colours across a portfolio of work and adding finishing marks much easier, says Jones.

"If you want to change a particular colour globally across a job you can do it pretty much within a couple of clicks, whereas before you’d have had to change every single one in a program like PitStop," he says. "And previously you’d have had to physically drop little crosses onto the banner where the finishing department should drop eyelets on, and that was a very manual process, whereas now you say ‘I want an eyelet every 300mm across the banner’ and it automatically does the whole thing. Or you just tell it you want six eyelets evenly spaced across the top."

Accurate previews
Another very handy feature, is the ProductionSuite’s previewing tool. "One of the things that we find is very good, is that once you’ve imported a file you’re actually viewing on-screen pretty much what you’re going to print," says Jones. "Whereas before if you had a job with transparency issues in it, you wouldn’t have found out until you got it over to the RIP, and then you would have had to start the job all over again."

Finally, the ink saving brought by such accurate colour profiling has also gone down well at Tower Printing. "We’re seeing a saving of around 8% or 9%," reports Jones. "When you think that we spend £80,000 on ink a year, that’s a £7,000 or £8,000 saving, so after a couple of years we should have paid for the software."

Jones is certainly one very happy customer, then. GMG has been very supportive, he reports, providing good training in the two week installation period, and lots of back-up for further queries and for any slight technical hitches.

"GMG gave us lots of support because it was one of the first installs of ProductionSuite," says Jones. "There have been a few issues, because the package needs drivers for it to work with every kind of device, and where it’s new software, a lot of those haven’t actually been built. So there’s been a bit of delay on that, but GMG has been quick to solve those problems."

One bit of advice Jones would give anyone considering investing in the software is to be prepared for the amount of work involved in maintaining accurate colour profiles across all devices, and to make sure there is someone available to put in the 10 hours or so a week needed for this.

"Once the colour calibration is set up it just works in the background, but someone has to set that up," reports Jones. "And even once you’ve built the profile and you’ve measured it, in two weeks time you’ve got to redo it because the colours need to be very accurate and the machines do wander around a little bit."

Jones adds: "We’ve spoken to other people about it and they’ve agreed that it’s just something you have to accept. If you want accurate colour management, yes the software will do that, but you have to manage that yourself as well, you do have to allow time for it."

With this disclaimer given, however, Jones has no qualms in wholeheartedly recommending ProductionSuite to other wide-format printers needing to calibrate multiple devices for multiple substrates.

"The primary feature is obviously colour management, but the Editor is a massive advantage and the ink saving is a bonus on top of that," concludes Jones. "It’s predominantly a colour management tool, but the Editor tool saves a lot of time and is a very good piece of software, and the ink saving means the software pays for itself."