HP Indigo Presses and Color Management

[msierra]

We have several HP Indigo presses. Does anyone running Indigo presses employ some sort of Color Management process? Outside of HP standard recommendations.

 

[curiosity]

Absolutely. We aim to match our offset presses. This means we employ custom LUTs, input and output profiles. Otherwise, overall color seems to be targeting "pleasant" colors, which is too saturated, in general.

 

[msierra]

Thank you for the reply. About 3 years back we did achieve G7 Certification and maintained that for 2 years but it seemed a bit over the top. We used Oris Color Tuner Web to periodically validate our presses using a color target. Particularly as we only used a single substrate to obtain the G7 Certification. Are you using an application to monitor color? Like Curve 3 or Oris Color Tuner.

 

[curiosity]

For custom LUTs we use G7 related software (I think it's Curves and IdeaLink?). From there we tweak the the results a bit (a little here and there based on test results and some common sense). I use those custom LUTs to create a press profile. Then we implement appropriate color management in the Ticket Templates. The results are very close to what happens at our offset presses.
Because we print color proofs for our clients daily, we're able to monitor results daily. We've recently acquired a 7900 press and the results have been very consistent.

About monitoring color: although I described part of our process, the devil is in the details. Contact me offline if you're interested in more.

 

[Schnitzel]

May I ask why did you go for G7 in a digital press? What's the benefit of it if you can easily create an ICC profile which gives you gray balance?

 

[curiosity]

Schnitzel,

We did not go for G7 on our digital press. However, related software allowed me to easily create custom LUTs that rendered better (matching to our offset) color as compared to HP default LUTs. We hit "better" color quickly using the custom LUTs and profiles too (as opposed to default profiles).

I'd like to answer your question, but I'm not so sure I just did.

 

[Schnitzel]

I might have got the G7 part wrong - did you achieve G7 for your offset presses or the Indigo?

It's safe to say custom ICC profiles will always give you better results than a generic profile.

 

[curiosity]

My bad Scnitzel. I re-read your post and I think your question was directed to msierra.