Cmyk + og

[Crown Labels Yorkshire]

Hi - I am relatively new to the print industry and there are a couple of areas I struggle with in regards to colour management/expectation. We have an Epson Surepress digital label press which has orange and green ink (in addition to CMYK+W). If the bulk of graphic designers are creating illustrations and label designs in a CMYK colour space, how are we able to offer the full capabilities and gamut of our press. I understand if we turn various spot colours into pantones then the pre-press software will use the orange and green ink to get a closer match, but it seems a shame that some designers we come across are designing in a limited colour gamut when we can give them so much more!

What's the best way to get the most out of a press like this and design!?!

 

[gordo]

Have them supply their images in RGB mode and you do the conversion to cmykog using a profile of your printer.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Spots and large panels of colour are different to photographic images. Just because an output is capable of more, does not mean that the input will achieve more. Yes, with common offset CMYK input this is a self fulfilling prophecy… However even with wider gamut RGB, photographic images may or may not greatly benefit from the wider output gamut of your printer. The output is still limited by the input image content. Even though typical offset press gamut is not great, people are used to it.

There are various manual methods to increase the saturation of a lower gamut image (converting to RGB - changing saturation - possibly reconverting to the wider gamut device CMYK, or as an alternative making touch/bump plates in the original CMYK file etc).

For a more automated approach, you could look at the following:

http://touch7.co

(I have no affiliation with the product or company and this is not an endorsement, just a heads up, I personally think that this is easy enough to do in Photoshop with an action)



Stephen Marsh

 

[gordo]

Spots and large panels of colour are different to photographic images. Just because an output is capable of more, does not mean that the input will achieve more. Yes, with common offset CMYK input this is a self fulfilling prophecy… However even with wider gamut RGB, photographic images may or may not greatly benefit from the wider output gamut of your printer. The output is still limited by the input image content. Even though typical offset press gamut is not great, people are used to it.

There are various manual methods to increase the saturation of a lower gamut image (converting to RGB - changing saturation - possibly reconverting to the wider gamut device CMYK, or as an alternative making touch/bump plates in the original CMYK file etc).

For a more automated approach, you could look at the following:

http://touch7.co

(I have no affiliation with the product or company and this is not an endorsement, just a heads up, I personally think that this is easy enough to do in Photoshop with an action)

Stephen Marsh

To the OP (to extend Stephen's post), it's a very straightforward process to see if incoming images would benefit from the OG inks using either PhotoShop or Colorthink (and other apps I'm sure).
Touch 7 does automate the creation of multi-channel separations such as CMYKOG, but it does require manual editing of the extra ink hue names for each image done if the canned names are not what you're using. It's also an expensive solution if you only do a few extended gamut images. Also, in my experience, in the end, Touch 7 is not any faster than doing the separations manually in PhotoShop.