Confused About Color Management

[grafixemporium]

Ok... so you guys are wayyy over my head. You're making me feel a little inadequate.

Long story short. I need to outsource some large flex faces for a lighted cabinet sign. The flex faces need to match the wraps we printed in house for the client's fleet. I learned today that the company we outsource to uses UV inks for printing translucent flex. I was told that the color gamut of the UV inks cannot get anywhere close to the bright green and hot pink in the design. It has nothing to do with sending them an RGB vs CMYK file... they are saying the inks can't do it. I'm feeling a little stressed! Going to visit the printer in the morning and take a look at some color samples off their printer.

 

[eye4clr]

That's where our workflows differ. In order to create a swop gray balance I would have to reduce the ink limits to balance the CMY and I like to keep them as high as possible to get the best color depth.

If you chose, you could do your ink restrictions as you do them for max gamut, then focus the grey balance efforts on the 3/4 tones and lighter. This way you max gamut and have close to proper grey balance before the ICC.

I also find that if you max C and M restrictions then use the Y restriction to improve grey balance from 3/4 tone to black, you'll get the best of all worlds and make less work for your ICC to do.

But I'm willing to wager that you're getting great results the way you're doing it now. Don't mind me.

 

[Jgentry]

Wow it's like suddenly color theory trumped the poster.

Ask your printer if you can get a copy of their output icc profile for the media they will be printing on. Have them email it to you. Soft proof your image in Photoshop using their icc profile and see for yourself what kind of color you can get. Turn gamut warning on in PS and push the saturation until you clip the gamut warning. If you don't understand how to soft proof read about it in the PS help or online.

A calibrated monitor will help you judge your colors when soft proofing.

If they won't send you the profile ask them what type of printer they use and get icc profiles from the manufacturer that are intended for a similar media.

 

[Rooster]

I also find that if you max C and M restrictions then use the Y restriction to improve grey balance from 3/4 tone to black, you'll get the best of all worlds and make less work for your ICC to do.

Yeah, if I need to balance the lin scale it's usually the yellow that's out. I'm not too worried about overworking my icc, he works cheap and hasn't missed a day since he started. I'm a slave driver I tells ya. With the GCR cranked up, the gray balance stays put under most any lighting conditions. It's not the way I'd print fine art, but it prevents surprises. As long as I keep the black out of the lower quarter tones (it's a lot I know), it doesn't dirty up the highlights very much. I'd like to see how the EcoHS1 ink set with the light black work for metameric shifts, but my local dealer just looks at me funny when I ask about them.

Mimaki's eco-sols can metamerize pretty bad without some help from the black channel. They also don't have a very good red at faster speeds. So I'm hesitant to remove any magenta or yellow from my ink limits.

 

[dmcprint]

All this talk about SWOP... Anyone out there using GRACol Standards?