Five Tips To Help Get Your Color Right

When used properly, color management tools, techniques, and processes provide a much better correlation between what you see on-screen and what the inkjet printer or offset press will produce. As with any tool or technology, the key is to use it correctly.

Color management has become more accessible nowadays for print shops of all types and sizes. Here are a few tips to help you get the best possible color from your set-up.

1. One of the most basic first steps for a color-managed workflow is monitor profiling. It’s easy, and the tools on the market today are inexpensive and take just a few minutes to set up. Give it a try, and you’ll be surprised at the results from just this basic process.
2. Most printers come with profiles, and my advice is to make sure you use them. Also, if you use a wide variety of paper that doesn’t come from the printer vendor, you might want to invest in a printer profiling tool as it can profile a wider variety of paper. If you use third-party inks, you must profile your printer, as the “canned” profiles that come installed are built using the standard manufacturers’ inks and papers. Printer profiling can be accomplished easily these days, with several hardware options which make simple work out of what used to be a very daunting task.
3. An important factor in color management is viewing conditions—the lighting under which you evaluate color. Office, or fluorescent, lighting is not a good light source for evaluating colors. Typically you want D50 or D65 standards, which better represent average daylight. Most importantly, however, is that you standardize how you evaluate color. Make sure you always use the same type of lighting for profiling and evaluating proofs every time.
4. As far as tools that make color management more understandable for printers, try using available swatch files to help predict color on an offset press. There are systems which provide side-by-side examples of how colors will print in four-color process versus other types of print technologies. Some also provide HTML values for Web page designs, and sRGB values in case you want to use the colors in presentations, or mobile or motion executions.
5. There are two popular methods for ensuring the output is the same when printing from various sources (such as an inkjet printer, a wide-format printer, and a commercial press).
   First, use the source and destination profile settings—the source profile is the printer you want to match to, so if you want the inkjet printer to match your press, use the press profile as the source, and the inkjet printer as the destination profile.

Second, this method requires a RIP. If you are using a RIP, there should be a setting called Simulation—in the case of matching your press, the destination profile would be the inkjet printer, and the simulation profile would be set to the press.

Andy Hatkoff is the vice president—OEM and Technology Licensing at Pantone.