Hey all, long time reader, never really posted.
I'm a lone Prepress Op at a smallish printing firm in Aus. Our presses consist of Heidelberg 5 col. SM52, 2 col. PM74, and one HP Indigo 3500 (soon to be 7600). We also have a Xerox Color 1000. For proofing, we have two Epson Stylus Pro 7900s. Our workflow for Offset is Heidelberg Prinect, while digital is un-managed with just the typical PDF dropbox style workflow. I have around 7 years experience in Prepress, but just one area of it I am still scratchy at is colour management, I know enough to get me by just fine, but not enough to achieve my main aim:
Gain consistency across all formats.
Our offset is fully colour managed, we conform to the ISO v2 standard, the Prinect workflow handles that side of things perfectly for me, and 99% of the time jobs end up matching the Epson proofs near perfectly, only exception would be fine screens on uncoated stock, on the proof sometimes really fine screens drop out, but because of dot gain they print slightly heavier on the press.
On the Indigo, we are still somewhat printing blind, because any attempt at using the same ICC on that press puts the colours wildly out. In a test print the other day, a block of colour consisting of 85C and 100Y raw on the file (device cmyk, not colour managed within Indesign), added a whole bunch of Magenta when using the ISO Coated v2 input profile on the press. We tend to get better results simply running with the default HP press output profile and leaving all ICCs disabled for input.
The Xerox 1000 is a whole different story, the default input profile is what we want - ISO Coated v2, but the colours for some reason print much brighter on that press than say, on the Indigo when we use the profile, and is also different to our offset presses.
So what would be recommended for this situation? I am assuming that it's all to do with the press output profiles and to fix it I would need a colour spectro to measure each press individually, is this correct? In a perfectly colour managed workflow, would the input profiles for each press be exactly the same (in this case ISO v2), but the output profiles press specific? Or is my understanding of that not correct? How much work and knowledge is involved in achieving this aim?
Looking forward to some advice
Cheers.
I'm a lone Prepress Op at a smallish printing firm in Aus. Our presses consist of Heidelberg 5 col. SM52, 2 col. PM74, and one HP Indigo 3500 (soon to be 7600). We also have a Xerox Color 1000. For proofing, we have two Epson Stylus Pro 7900s. Our workflow for Offset is Heidelberg Prinect, while digital is un-managed with just the typical PDF dropbox style workflow. I have around 7 years experience in Prepress, but just one area of it I am still scratchy at is colour management, I know enough to get me by just fine, but not enough to achieve my main aim:
Gain consistency across all formats.
Our offset is fully colour managed, we conform to the ISO v2 standard, the Prinect workflow handles that side of things perfectly for me, and 99% of the time jobs end up matching the Epson proofs near perfectly, only exception would be fine screens on uncoated stock, on the proof sometimes really fine screens drop out, but because of dot gain they print slightly heavier on the press.
On the Indigo, we are still somewhat printing blind, because any attempt at using the same ICC on that press puts the colours wildly out. In a test print the other day, a block of colour consisting of 85C and 100Y raw on the file (device cmyk, not colour managed within Indesign), added a whole bunch of Magenta when using the ISO Coated v2 input profile on the press. We tend to get better results simply running with the default HP press output profile and leaving all ICCs disabled for input.
The Xerox 1000 is a whole different story, the default input profile is what we want - ISO Coated v2, but the colours for some reason print much brighter on that press than say, on the Indigo when we use the profile, and is also different to our offset presses.
So what would be recommended for this situation? I am assuming that it's all to do with the press output profiles and to fix it I would need a colour spectro to measure each press individually, is this correct? In a perfectly colour managed workflow, would the input profiles for each press be exactly the same (in this case ISO v2), but the output profiles press specific? Or is my understanding of that not correct? How much work and knowledge is involved in achieving this aim?
Looking forward to some advice
Cheers.
