Colours are important in printing and in our life too… Colours are vibrant, they give a lot of dimensions to anything around us, they symbolise the real essence and characteristics of elements, it denotes meaning and helps to identify objects. Life will be dull without the Colours. Similarly, Colours make the printing process meaningful and it enhances the overall appeal of any kind of printing. We are discussing here the importance of Colours, with its aesthetic and technical aspects Colour management in the printing process.
Let’s first understand, why is Colour management important: Colour management provides a practically vital level of assistance to the printed substrate. “Perfectly ‘tuned’ Colour management reduces ink consumption, improves quality and raises productivity thanks to increased speed and the capability to minimise remakes, as accurate Colour reproduction reduces chances for errors.” Colour Management also helps to maintain your brand guidelines and gives you the desired print results all the time.
Why is Colour management important in pre-press: The real benefit of Colour management is that it enables Colour simulation across the ‘workflow’ – it is an ‘enabling’ technology. Colour management involves calibrating your devices (digital camera, scanner, monitor and printer), creating ICC (International Colour Consortium) profiles and then setting up and using the ICC profiles correctly. It also enables printers to print with the most accurate Colours as per your artworks.
After knowing the importance of Colour management, let’s get to know the process: “Colour management” is a process where the Colour characteristics for every device in the imaging chain is known precisely and utilized in Colour reproduction. It often occurs behind the scenes and doesn’t require any intervention, but when Colour problems arise, understanding this process can be critical. The goal of Colour management is to match Colour appearance as closely as possible from input to output and between devices.
The objectives of Colour management: The primary goal of Colour management is to obtain a good match across Colour devices; for example, the Colours of one frame of a video should appear the same on a computer LCD monitor, on a plasma TV screen, and as a printed poster.
The 4 components of Colour management: There are four components that make up an ICC Colour management system, the PCS (Profile connection space, normally CIELAB), the device Profile, a CMM (Colour management module) and Rendering Intent. Let’s take a look at all four of these components and the role they play in a Colour management system.
- PCS (Profile connection space): The profile connection space is the Colour space in which the Colour conversion or remapping takes place. We already know that CIELAB is an ideal Colour space for this conversion because it is not Device Dependent, for this reason, CIELAB is usually the profile connection Colour space used.
- Device Profile: A Profile is a file that describes the Colour characteristics of a particular device or Colour space. For example, monitors, scanners, printers and cameras can all have profiles that describe their unique Colour properties. An image is often described as tagged with a profile, basically, this is a very small file that is actually “tagged” or associated with your image file. A profile can be removed or changed, but doing so does not alter the original file.
- CMM (Colour Management Module): A Colour management module is the engine that converts Colour data from one profile or Colour space to another. For example, Apple’s Colour-sync engine can convert an image’s Colours from a monitor Colour space to a printer Colour space and vice versa.
- Rendering Intent: When a Colour conversion is applied from one profile to another four different rendering intents can be applied. Rendering intent is simply the method for mapping or remapping Colour values. You can select the rendering intent that best suits your purpose or image characteristics.
Many times, you must have heard about the terms RGB & CMYK but never know their real meaning or purpose in the printing. Both RGB & CMYK are important in various stages of the printing process and understanding the difference between them is even more important.
- RGB is an additive Colour model, while CMYK is subtractive.
- RGB uses white as a combination of all primary Colours and black as the absence of light. CMYK, on the other hand, uses white as the natural Colour of the print background and black as a combination of Coloured inks.
- Graphic designers and print providers use the RGB Colour model for any type of media that transmits light, such as computer screens. RGB is ideal for digital media designs because these mediums emit Colour as red, green, or blue light.
- With the RGB Colour model, pixels on a digital monitor are – if viewed with a magnifying glass – all one of three Colours: red, green, or blue. The white light emitted through the screen blends the three Colours on the eye’s retina to create a wide range of other perceived Colours. With RGB, the more Colour beams the device emits, the closer the Colour gets to white. Not emitting any beams, however, leads to the Colour black. This is the opposite of how CMYK works.
- CMYK is best for print materials because print mediums use Coloured inks for messaging. CMYK subtracts Colours from natural white light and turns them into pigments or dyes. Printers then put these pigments onto paper in tiny cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dots – spread out or close together to create the desired Colours. With CYMK, the more Coloured ink placed on a page, the closer the Colour gets to black. Subtracting cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks create white – or the original Colour of the paper or background.
- RGB Colour values range from 0 to 255, while CMYK ranges from 0-100%.
After reading this, you must be wondering which Colour profile is best for printing?
We suggest, recommend and use CMYK. When designing for a printed format, the best Colour profile to use is CMYK, which uses the base Colours of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (or Black). RGB Colours may look good on screen but they will need converting to CMYK for printing. If you are supplying artwork in its original formats, such as InDesign or QuarkXPress of CorelDraw or Illustrator or any other format, then it is better to convert Colours to CMYK before supplying artwork and files.
We at Print Image take critical care while processing the printing jobs of our clients at each stage. We follow 6 simple steps to ensure efficient Colour Management:
- Make Profiled Conversions. Assign an ICC profile to all image files either during Raw conversion or scanning. Use appropriate profiles to make conversions into other Colour spaces with derivative files only. Minimize the number of conversions made.
- Calibrate Monitor Using Hardware & Computer setting. Minimize the influence of other light sources during characterization. Use the software to help set monitor brightness between 90 and 100 and choose White Point D65 and Gamma 2.2.
- Set Good Colour Settings. In all the software that we use we ensure appropriate Colour Settings (in the Edit Menu) and set Colour Management Policies to Preserve Embedded Profiles and when opening/pasting. Choose a wide gamut device neutral editing space.
- Simulate the appearance of a print before printing. Check Simulate Paper Colour and choose a rendering intent of either Perceptual or Relative Colourimetric. Make output specific adjustments before printing. Use these adjust- ments only when printing these media.
- Navigate Printer Driver Correctly. Use Photoshop / Lightroom or printer driver to manage Colour – not both. In general, favour using Photoshop / Lightroom as this is the most versatile allowing you to use custom output profiles.
- Control Environment. Edit and evaluate images in neutral surroundings. Minimize the effect of extraneous light sources, such as glare on monitors or backlighting. Evaluate proofs and prints inappropriate lighting. There’s much more that can be said about each of these topics – but, not much more to do.
Print Image is precisely on the way to achieving consistent, high-quality results for your Colours and print. With the latest printing machine and technology, we ensure precise Colour representation of your printing jobs.