JF-1631 reprography and color matching

[kmcclary]

Anyone have any tips for matching customer supplied graphic colors?
At the moment we are running a Minolta CR-221 Chroma meter to get the values, printing color chips with those values and measuring the difference, then printing again. This can take up to all day having the printer locked up matching colors on graphics so we are not running production. We also have had the input profile turned off in mimaki's rasterlink rip program to get unaltered colors.
With the input cmyk icc color profile loaded the printer reproduces some colors well, but others are way off.
Any help would be appreciated.

 

[J Hill Designs]

profile your system, and all should be well in the world

 

[kmcclary]

profile your system, and all should be well in the world

we dont have a copy of the profiling software so do we need to have mimaki come out to profile it? or is this not what you are referring to?

 

[J Hill Designs]

or you can get software - might be worth it since not having it bottlenecks your productivity

 

[kmcclary]

or you can get software - might be worth it since not having it bottlenecks your productivity

alright thanks!

 

[eye4clr]

even with the best profiles in the world, when someone walks in the door with something for you to "match", you're setup for some ugly work editing the color.

Thing is, no matter how well your system performs, the overwhelming odds are that what walked in the door was not well color managed.

I charge by the hour for this work since it can be such a huge time suck. Of all the things I might bend on price for, this is the last.

 

[P Wagner]

even with the best profiles in the world, when someone walks in the door with something for you to "match", you're setup for some ugly work editing the color.

Thing is, no matter how well your system performs, the overwhelming odds are that what walked in the door was not well color managed.

I charge by the hour for this work since it can be such a huge time suck. Of all the things I might bend on price for, this is the last.

Well said Eye. It is a commonly held belief that a profile is responsible for the spot color match, when virtually all RIPs have mechanisms in them for identifying Pantone and other (Roland Color System for example in Versaworks) spot colors. Most also have the ability to define and create custom colors as well. I'm not saying that the profile does not play an important role, but it is not the only player.

I recently spent a morning at a customer site, and one of the things we were doing was trying to reproduce about 8 - 10 colors of Sherwin Williams wall paint. This customer had been trying to reproduce these colors for over a week (on and off) and was completely frustrated by the time it was taking and the lack of results they were seeing.

The task of measuring the colors in the RIP (from paint chips), creating custom-named spot colors there and in Illustrator, and then printing an accurate representation of those colors was all done in about 45 minutes. To do this resquires a spectrophotometer that is supported by your RIP. The XRite i1 Pro is among the most widely-used these days. This procedure will get you roughly 95% of the way to the best possible match on many, if not most colors that are in-gamut.