reply to gig0
reply to gig0
let's split the answer
I understand how UCR/GCR profiles can save big bucks for the RR Donnelly's and Quebecor's of publishing, but is there a significant cost savings for those 5 to 10 million dollar medium sized commercial printers?
Calculate the amount of 4c work you're doing. GCR will normally not do any changes to stationary, spot color work or primary color advertising signage. Only where on your original artwork C+M+Y occur in the same pixel, will it remove parts of each and replace using K. The increase in K is often similar to the amount taken out of EACH of the other 3 channels. How much can get taken out also depends on how much GCR was already applied to the separation originally.
As mentioned earlier this is only the monetary saving in ink. More difficult to calculate is often the saving in make-ready both in time and waste. Also higher print speeds due to less "wet" prints, less other drying issues and pages being faster ready for post-press work (folding, stitching, binding) as there's less drying time.
Finally we notice that job rejections are far less as tonality from proof to print is maintained usually much better. So you haveless often to juggle schedules around because you have to reprint a job, which you thought already left the building - OK, it did, but in the waste skid ... - so you still paid for plates, paper and ink used.
Tighter schedules and less rejections normally mean better margins - or higher profitability with increased competitiveness.
How practical is it if 40%-50% of the workflow are bulletproof repeats? I can easily see the savings going right out the window due to downtime or reprinting a job thanks to the customer rejecting it because of inconsistencies from one run to the next.
"bulletproof repeats"???? with grays mainly consisting of C+M+Y and a slight hint of K? Even with the same plates that's as bulletproof as Russian Roulette.
I'd pretty much guarantee you'll have less likely a rejection with GCR use than without - provided you use a good tool.
I'd imagine there would be different results depending on the stock used as well so there would need to be different paper profiles, correct?
On the contrary. Using the same GCR file one slightly different print conditions shows less deviations than using the unaltered identical CMYK file on these same different print conditions. So while GRACoL2006 and FOGRA39 are close but usually not visually exchangeable, once processed as GCR (on whichever of those 2 standards) the print results become almost identical.
I'm just curious as to how much UCR/GCR has gotten better -or more confusing- since losing interest in it 10 years ago.
UCR/GCR have neither become better nor worse as they just are algorithms. Has 2+2 become better or worse? No - it is still 4. But now you might have tools which allow you to do with 2+2 things you never thought possible those 10 years ago - like "you need a calculator?" - Take your mobile phone! - You don't have one? - you're really still stuck 20 years ago ;-)
No - what put people off GCR was the lack of tools to apply it quickly, safely and in a reliable fashion. You mention further up the really large printers. If they do gravure printing it takes some time to engave one of those huge cylinders and then it runs for hundreds of thousands of impressions. As dot gain and minimal dot are different from sheetfed and also ink costs really are a number to calculate with, many of those had to reseparate incoming jobs anyway and so adopted GCR already years ago. If the software was slow it didn't matter, quality was important. They don't engrave 20 cylinders an hour per station.
Today products are faster, but still just like anything else that has to do with color management, there is this cloak of mystery that shrouds UCR/GCR. And you still get really bad ones. One of the worst examples if the most common tool: PhotoShop. It really does horrible CMYK to CMYK conversions. That alone could put someone off GCR for live.
Then there can be the believe in Generic CMYK and the standard use of "SWOP coated v2" for just about any print condition. That space itself is already so small that repurposing from there won't bring the lost colors back. But what usually happens is plating SWOP separated "generic" CMYK for sheetfed GRACoL printing and make it that way more intense. What technically happens is assigning the GRACoL profile to the SWOP separated CMYK. Welcome 22% dotgain ... This also creates a messy situation and as such not a good starting point for GCR tools.
Someone else asked if he can't just plug a profile into his CTP.
If the CTP supports device-link profiles, the answer might be "maybe". If it doesn't, then the answer is a clear "NO".
Without devicelink technology, don't even consider it.
But there are different flavors:
most device-link tools start with 2 independent profiles - 1 is your source, the CMYK space in which your document currently is and 2 is your destination, the space into which you want to convert. In a color server scenario both could be different standards, while in an ink optimization setup source and destination are identical.
Either way - the quality of the result is completely based on the "welding technique" employed by the software that creates the optimization profile. This is what you pay for.
The idea is to get a weld that is as seamless as possible. An exception is GMG's InkOptimizer where not 2 profiles get welded together, but a cast gets created and the input and output formed into the shape of the source and destination space. That this produces very high quality conversions is not really surprising considering GMG works with device link technology for now about 14 years and are the main supplier to the gravure industry in Europe (which is really big in Germany). So while many others only got their feet wet on device link in recent years, GMG has built on several software generations of experience.
The 2nd stage is obviously applying the GCR device-link profile to your documents. Doing it to images at the begin of page layout would be dangerous, because as we already know, retouching images with strong GCR is almost impossible as their gray balance is locked. Any attempts usually end in very flat image appearance (yes, we had this as a possible problem already mentioned).
So the GCR needs to be applied late - somewhere where color retouching is already done. In a PostScript-based workflow this would be difficult as the PS contains control codes and all kind of proprietary data - also it is often pre-separated, which would not work for color management any longer.
So everyone had to wait for PDF workflows.
Again except the gravure industry as they normally rip to 8bit TIFF, which gets engraved. Before the TIFF gets split into its channels GCR can be applied.
Back to your question what has changed with UCR/GCR?
The algorithms to calculate device link profiles and workflows that handle files which can be color managed: PDF
Should you invest in GCR tools now?
Unless you are focused on stationary or solid primariy printing: YES - at least check out what the market offers and which might be for you.
Prices and applications can vary widely. There are sales promises everywhere. Test them.
- does the application contaminate primaries and secondaries?
- does it turn K into CMYK?
- does it have to flatten a PDF in order to work?
- do blends remain smooth blends?
- are solids retained and how get neighboring colors affected?
- does it only process imagery or artowrk as well?
- can you choose different settings for images and artwork?
- how fast does it process?
- how flexible is the solution for different print conditions?
- how well does it integrate into your existing workflow?
You might not find your perfect solution (or well, you might). But keep eyes and ears open. These tools have matured and some are very well established and early release problems already years behind them.
I would not even be surprised to see after the loss of interest in proofing shootouts now GCR shootouts. Let's see if Abhay Sharma gets interested ;-)
