Question How often do you rebuild your color profiles?

[Charles@TheSignDude]

We have 2 HP latex 370's and we use ONYX for our RIP.
we have a total of 5 media profiles for them that we monitor the color on.
We print and measure to GRACoL.

My question is how often do you rebuild your profiles? We rebuilt them all last October and by the first part of November we noticed the colors dropping off. We rebuilt them again and now here we are December and they are falling off again.

Do you see big shifts when you have significant weather shifts?

Thanks for your feedback.

Charles

 

[FrankW]

Regularly you dont need to do a complete reprofiling, just do the linearization (the second step in the profiler assistant.

And yes, depending on temperature and humidity, specially thermal inkjet printers could show colour deviations.

There are methods to control and monitor color consistency: Colorcheck as a functionality of Onyx Thrive, or DOC integrated in Barbieri Spectrophotometers.

 

[Joe House]

Hey Charles,

When you say rebuild, are you completely starting from scratch or are you just recalibrating the profiles (linearizing them?)

Changes in weather can necessitate recalibration, especially if your print environment is not well controlled - temperature and humidity. Also, latex print heads have a much shorter life expectancy the piezo heads, so as the heads age, you could need to recalibrate as well. I know of some shops that make recalibration a part of their Monday routine. They do it every week, whether the test prints indicate it's necessary or not.

Good Luck,

Joe

 

[dypinc]

We have 2 HP latex 370's and we use ONYX for our RIP.
we have a total of 5 media profiles for them that we monitor the color on.
We print and measure to GRACoL.

My question is how often do you rebuild your profiles? We rebuilt them all last October and by the first part of November we noticed the colors dropping off. We rebuilt them again and now here we are December and they are falling off again.

Do you see big shifts when you have significant weather shifts?

Thanks for your feedback.

Charles

Not sure what you mean by rebuild profile. You either re-calibrate on the printer or re-linearize in the RIP or after trying both or those and you not getting what you want then create a new profile.

Are you running the calibration on the printer? I rarely ever need create a new profile.

 

[KellyP12]

We also have a Latex 370 and profile it on the front panel (though it communicates with Onyx), and we've found that for solid colors it's extremely consistent. No reprofiling needed if we just consistently run a color calibration 2-3 times a week.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

You "Should" Linearize/re-calibrate before any large job or at least once a week. If you notice major environmental changes you should re-calibrate then.

 

[eahicks]

The 5xx series will let you know when a profile needs calibration...I assumed the 3xx series did the same.

 

[DrunknMonk]

I re calibrate ever morning before any jobs are printed.

 

[Charles@TheSignDude]

Regularly you dont need to do a complete reprofiling, just do the linearization (the second step in the profiler assistant.

And yes, depending on temperature and humidity, specially thermal inkjet printers could show colour deviations.

There are methods to control and monitor color consistency: Colorcheck as a functionality of Onyx Thrive, or DOC integrated in Barbieri Spectrophotometers.

This may be a rookie question but what exactly do you mean by doing a inearization? Are you referring to the printing a new ICC swatch step and re scanning?

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

It's a process on board the HP or in your rip that prints swatches of CMYK in different densities so that the color chart can be calibrated to current conditions, some versions include common spot colors too.

 

[Reveal1]

We re-linearize (calibrate) with each head change or when it's obvious a supplier changes manufacturing source (like 3M did last year with 35c now made in Brazil). I'll get pushback, but more important on the HP 3/5 series is regularly scheduled head changes around 4200 ml point or at the first sign of significant color shift in your test patterns. HP designed the heads as a user serviceable consumable product and that they are. Changing the heads on a regular schedule will save a world of headaches. We factor that cost in our pricing and in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't make a big impact.

 

[FrankW]

This may be a rookie question but what exactly do you mean by doing a inearization? Are you referring to the printing a new ICC swatch step and re scanning?

It is a process of calibrating the increase of density. Regularly, a printer tries to set dots in a density that should match the input: a 60% black should look like a 60% black printed too. Due to that ink is liquid, depending on different issues the ink dots could run larger than calculated. In that case colour areas could be denser than they should, what could lead to colour deviation, or the loss of fine details. Doing a linearization checks patterns of different densities to find out the given densities and let the RIP or printer adjust the dithering.

If calibrating a Latex 360 - 570, with the integrated i1, calibration consists of 3 steps: limiting the ink, doing a linearization (HP named it color calibration for any unknown reason), and after that creating an ICC-Profile. Units without the i1 can only do ink limitation and linearization.