Package Design | packagedesignmag.com

(October 2011) posted on Mon Oct 10, 2011

By Patrick Henry

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It wouldn’t be correct to call color management a solution in search of a problem—the problem is well defined, and the technology’s ability to solve it is beyond dispute. Packaging professionals who’ve seen the benefits for themselves say that no quality-control technique does more than color management to bring about a pleasing and thoroughly predictable outcome on press.

The tools are certainly there, and so are a host of good reasons to take advantage of them in all forms of printed packaging. “Color management” is a blanket term for software applications, instrumentation, and prepress procedures that, when used systematically, assure that the appearance of color will be accurate and consistent at every stage of reproduction. That means keeping in close touch with press color at all times, never displaying or outputting to proof any color that the final printing device isn’t also capable of producing.

In a color-managed workflow, the proof or the image on the monitor always simulates, as faithfully as it can, the eventual output of the press. In a workflow lacking the guidance of color management, the picture on the screen could be misleading. Worse, the press run might have to be “tweaked” to make the final product conform to an equally misleading—but client-approved—contract proof.

Expectation, meet reality
Color management saves everyone from this kind of frustration by “aligning expectations with what the process can do,” says Patrice Aurenty, global leader, SmartColour group, Sun Chemical. In accomplishing this, he adds, it also eliminates redundant “loops of approval” that complicate workflows where color management isn’t used.

A digital technique, color management happens in a mathematically defined space that the color characteristics of monitors, scanners, proofers, and other prepress devices can be “mapped” to. Once their individual color gamuts have been mapped and reconciled, the devices can work together to render the same press-accurate color throughout the workflow.

Part of the goal, as Aurenty puts it, is to “manage color without visual assessment,” thereby eliminating the uncertainties that creep into the process whenever people make subjective judgment calls about the appearance of color.

Software tools for color management are relatively new, but some of their basic routines have been elements of package design and production for decades. Because it’s a discipline as well as a technology, color management rewards its most scrupulous practitioners with the most consistently satisfying results.