Color Management in Packaging Process (I)

Editor's note: The shortening of job preparation time, the increase of price pressure and the improvement of printing quality have made packaging a daily commodity. However, for a large number of packaging and printing plants, the matching of colors is not as easy as the production of daily necessities.

At present, packaging has become one of the most common components of a marketing mix and is becoming more and more important. The study found that many companies have reduced their spending on traditional advertising, but at the same time increased their budget on the packaging itself. Keeping the brand's consistency and integrity is the basis for brand owners to survive, but at the same time they need to be in the market to reduce their costs.

The shortening of job preparation time, increase of price pressure and improvement of printing quality have made packaging a daily commodity. Unfortunately, for a large number of packaging and printing plants, the matching of colors is not as easy as the production of daily necessities. In addition, most brand managers are not very proficient in color.

establish a brand

Any kind of packaging has many different functions, but the most important one is to let people visually identify the brand image. In general, the brand equity of consumer goods companies is mainly composed of colors and specific brands. When people walk on the street, who does not associate red with cola or orange with Tide (washing powder)?

Most of today's printing and packaging are made up of a variety of colors. This means that in addition to the standard yellow color, you have to use two, three or even four special colors to help consumers identify the brand image. Large consumer products companies often have a lot of brands, so when you decide to add a new brand image, you can imagine how many different colors of ink you need to use. In addition to the complex colors, the costs incurred in printing the packaging are also issues that cannot be ignored.

More than just a characterization file

All members of the packaging supply chain - from brand owners to printer operators - are accustomed to seeing color management tools as printing equipment used to produce identical feature representations. Although this shows the importance of color management, there are many other factors that can affect the final print quality of the job. Therefore, people will add a lot of new elements in the process of color management of packaging to improve the predictability of printing, so that the consistency of printing buyers and the printed products and even on the shelf is full of consistency between the same. confidence.

In simple terms, the role of the color management system is to correct and match colors. Of course, a color management system should also be able to measure the color - whether it is Huangpinqing black or spot color. However, its ability to handle spot colors is a criterion for us to evaluate the quality of a color management system, especially for packaging and printing plants. Only a few color management systems claim to be capable of simulating spot colors, but even so, they are rarely used for spot color measurements, and there is little access to color databases. In addition, these color management systems are usually independent solutions and must be connected to specific devices. They are not integrated into a RIP and a workflow color solution. It brings people a lot of complicated issues worth noting, such as the processing of dot gains, spot colors, printing color requirements, and the characteristics of opaque inks.

Color management includes many things, such as: color conversion (from RGB to CMYK), color gamut expansion, ink selection, and the expansion of printing outlets.

For participating in the IPA Proofing RoundUP (IPA Proofing RoundUP has performed a series of comprehensive tests on each system, including a subjective analysis of the similarity between each proof and the test sheet printed on the offset press (visual) , and an objective analysis of the accuracy of each proof in the reproduction of ECI2002's color management goals (colorimetric measurement method.) Also includes a subjective and objective analysis of the accuracy of spot color reproduction, the scope of analysis of the target is 11 kinds of This seems to be a very basic problem for people in the course of research, but keep in mind that it was not long ago that most people still used mistakes. The method of color matching, and until now, the number of people using the wrong method has not been significantly reduced.

Of course, people do color management in order to match proofs with printed pages, and it is also a major factor in determining whether a printer can print a good job. Of course, another important reason is that the color gamut of a four-color printer is generally smaller than the color gamut of an inkjet printer. If you want flexible prints, it is best to produce on the printer instead of the press. Fingerprinting with a printer is a relatively quick return on investment. If you can quickly adjust the status of your job to a state suitable for printing, you can save a lot of time (finance) for printing, and you can also increase the uptime of the press.

Data Collection Considerations

When you make proofs for print production, the color gamut on the press is actually very small. I want to briefly explain this issue. Many people are willing to collect data in the printer's characteristic description file, read the characteristic description file from some printing products of the printing machine, and then directly use the data to adjust the printing press. For any printing company, the first thing you are looking for is the predictability of print results, no matter how you do color management. The printer must be able to create a proof that predicts the performance of the press. I suggest that you adjust the press to a stable operating state (just like the proofer). If you use a proofer, you will correct it every day and rely on its test results. Because of this, the printing company will never let a printing proof - used for proofing correction and adjusting the characteristic description curve - represent its own highest printing level. In fact, it is the most representative printed sheet in the production process, and it is also the only way you can associate the proofs with the predictability of the printing press.

The first thing to do is optimize the press. Create your own characterization curve and find the correct SWOP value and ink density, and then create the printer's profile. Your work must have some repeatability. We have a large number of global customers who want the same printing effect on different presses. If you don't need to print paper proofs, you may have problems with ink, saturation, and whiteness in actual production. If you use the same inks, substrates, and plates to produce proofs, you should get the same profile. We recommend that customers use SWOP curves and adapt flexo highlights.

Two color management approaches in a system

Color management can be achieved in two ways: chroma and spectrum.

Colorimetric color management systems based on the CIE L*a*b* color space can identify colors in a wide range of color gamuts and verify their accuracy. This measuring system is mainly operated by using a printing characteristic table containing a lot of color blocks printed by different proportions of CMYK inks. Chroma color management system can describe the final effect of color, but it does not reflect the interaction between them.

For printing operations that do not use uniform inks, a highly flexible color management system that can be used with a range of spot colors is required. This is what we call the spectral color management system. This system is able to determine the characteristics of the ink. It mainly relies on measuring the spectrum when printed separately and overprinted with other inks. In addition, the spectrum color management system can also measure the opacity that has a significant effect on the actual printing effect of the ink. It is understood that the opacity of opaque inks and metallic inks is obviously higher than that of conventional CMYK inks. Of course, our main purpose is to understand their influence on the overprinting effect. Using a database-driven mathematical model, the spectral color management system can provide users with the only feasible spot color solution. It is the best way to manage spot colors and field blocks. By deducing the interaction between any set of inks, it can describe the underlying mechanisms that affect the final printing effect - and can correctly "read" the ink's overprint effect by measuring the opacity of the ink.

A perfect packaging color management system should integrate the colorimetric and spectral color management systems to provide users with the most ideal color management solution - it must have both an accurate CMYK and a database of spot color matching. . Only in this way can the overprint effect between spot colors and CMYK be accurately predicted.

A packaging color management system that combines a colorimetric color management system with a spectral color management system not only uses the CMYK feature description map but also the spectral characteristic description map of spot colors.

With the help of spectrograms, the color management system can describe any set of characteristics of printing primaries and spot colors, such as metallic inks and Pantone inks. These profiles can be used to optimize the press to reduce the amount of ink used and increase the depth of color.

The system can predict the printing effect of any set of inks in the database and can accurately preview and proof it. He can easily add custom inks to the database.

The ICC color profile specification is currently a popular specification that provides users with a standard format. However, different distributors have different matching principles and private labels. ICC provides very limited results for workflows that do not use CMYK inks, and it is not possible to measure the opacity of the spot colors themselves and the opacity after overprinting. Therefore, the most important task of the package color management system is to provide comprehensive support for the ICC profile, but at the same time it must have features that are not available in the ICC format.

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