Packaging Workflows: Spot Color Printing

Creo’s “Spotless” Technology Yields Spot-Color Look from Process Builds

Spot colors” are premixed inks that designers often specify to reproduce colors beyond the ones that can be obtained from the four basic process inks C, M, Y, and K. Bright, smooth spot colors enable package designers to protect and control their colors, helping their packages to move the product and promote the brand. Using spot colors comes at a cost, however. The complexity and expense that they add to packaging can translate to higher prices or thinner margins on products.

Creo claims that its new Spotless printing technology is poised to change the way designers, buyers, and printers think about spot colors. Spotless printing, according to Creo, makes spot ink replacement practical and reliable for the first time.

Because Spotless printing represents spot colors with process color builds, says Creo, difficulties associated with traditional spot inks are reduced. As the company that pioneered Staccato, the first production-ready stochastic screen, Creo believes Spotless printing can take the advantages of stochastic to the next level.

Silencing the “noise”

A stochastic screen, according to Creo, can provide very smooth tint builds with no rosettes, crosshatch patterns, or other visual “noise” that is a traditional problem with most other screens. Staccato also resists grey balance and tonal fluctuations from misregistration and density shifts. This means that process builds behave like spot colors—they have the stability and the even look of a pre-mixed ink.

Creo says that Staccato lets designers and printers use color builds to replace spot color inks with more confidence and accuracy than ever before. Because spot colors are automatically converted to process colors, designers can specify dozens of spot colors in a single file, thereby increasing the impact of their printed materials.

Staccato screening and the SQUAREspot® thermal imaging heads on Creo’s various computer-to-plate devices enable the use of Spotless printing solutions. With Spotless printing, the spot replacement “recipes” are based on actual press conditions (press, paper, ink, etc.). Similarly, proofing becomes easier and more accurate. Even remote desktop proofers can be used with Spotless, says Creo, opening new opportunities for collaboration.

CMYK and beyond

Two Spotless packages are in the works for release this summer. The first, Spotless 4, creates and stores spot color recipes to achieve spot colors with process builds in the standard CMYK printing environment.

The other product, Spotless X, enables the use of additional process colors such as red, orange, green, or blue to expand the available color gamut. Spotless X, says Creo, will typically be used in the traditional domain of spot colors: vector art. It also can be used with photographic images to increase realism or to provide “candy floss” colors for added impact and shelf appeal.
Creo says Spotless is unique in that its ink set is very flexible: any extended colors can be selected. Creo adds that Spotless makes it possible to use a particular brand color as a process color in order to preserve its integrity, while also using it in spot color recipes.

Creo notes that Spotless can help printers that already use a six-color replacement technology, such as Pantone Hexachrome. Spotless is said to make these solutions easier to use by pulling their databases into a composite workflow for efficient color management, trapping, and proofing, thus making any spot color replacement tool more useful and reliable than traditional separated workflow solutions.

These advantages, say Creo, mean that Spotless printing can enable designers and printers to accomplish more for less in terms of good color reproduction.