Integrated colour workflow for DC260 and 250

che.c

Well-known member
Hi I just found these forums today when doing a bit of research on colour. Had a browse about and it seems like a great resource, lots of people who obviously know what they're talkin about. Your help would be much appreciated in setting up a bit of colour accuracy, skip past the italics if you don't want the rambling background story!

I recently got a job at a digital print shop, inheriting the running of a 250 with an office finisher and a 260 with a light production finisher. They were duplexing coated stock every day (and not thanking us for it) and jamming all the time, awful registration (needed adjusted for every job).

Luckily we have quite dedicated engineers, and having talked to them, and constantly bothered them with call outs they now run pretty smoothly with ±1mm front/back, hardly any jamming and folders/booklet making often with no skew at all. Belts, developer tanks, transfer rollers all replaced on the both of them - they get pushed pretty hard.

Now I run them more or less in spec, except for printing on 350gsm card now and again. The best change to make to the running of them is no longer duplexing coated stock, the registration was always bad and I'd end up with black marks developing after about 30sh or so.

With all the distractions of the misregistration, jams, dirty marks, bands, colour shifts, toner spitting and skew removed I noticed that the colour between the two machines wasn't even close! The 250 is washed out but reasonably accurate, the 260 tends to a yellow cast and is generally too dark.


So I decided to try and construct a half-coherent colour workflow (we had the old 'look at it, does it look right?) system in before..). I'm thinking of feeding the colour server device independent CMYK (that's generic CMYK right?) and RGB (RGB colour accuracy isn't important, it just has to look nice).

RGB through whatever rendering intent is suitable for the job, and the CMYK through a Device Link profile. There are three stocks we commonly print on, so I'm thinking that I need three profiles for each printer, at the very least.

1.I've set up new output profiles (we're using Fiery Colour Servers - the base model) for each stock, but I'm unsure what calibration sets to associate with them - or can I make a new set?

2. When I'm printing out the profile pages to make an ICC profile, what settings should I have in my Colorwise, Sim profile:none & output profile:chosen stock?

3. Am I even close in my thinking on how to get these two printers imaging off the same hymn sheet?!

I'm using a mac, and I generally print from InDesign, sometimes from Acrobat and rarely from Photoshop and Quark.

Any advice would be much appreciated, I'm still trying to get my head wrapped round the colour workflow in these presses from screen to sheet.
 
if what you are trying to do is "match" the output from 2 engines, you need an EFI Profiler Kit. It comes with an Spectophotometer; with it, you can create custom profiles from each engine and then merge them to have a standard color profile on both of them.

if you can't invest on it, my suggestion is :

1. Calibrate each engine (Auto Gradiation Tool in the print engine)
2. Make sure you have the same Color Workflow in both Fierys (ColorWise : RGB, CMYK, Spot, Output, etc)
3. Calibrate each Fiery under Plain Settings
4. Calibrate the Auto Gray Adjustment in each Fiery

there's documentation for all of this available at http://www.xerox.com/support

hope this helps
 
Thanks for yer reply Rflores. It's when I did that to the engines and was expecting them to be very close in output that I realised that things weren't going to be as simple. Colour workflow's the same in both, calibrated on the same stock, to Plain. Unfortunately calibrating to plain ended up with woeful colour on the 260 so I had to use a different set, heavyweight 2 I think. Auto Gradation and Auto Gray have both been done as well. This is what puzzled me!

We have very good engineers (direct from Xerox, not our click reseller) and they are satisfied that everything's right on the hardware end of things.

I've had a good read through all the manuals about colour in the fiery, and they helped explain a lot, although they were opaque on some points.

I wanted to set up Device Link profiles to get consistency across stocks and between the machines. I'm just not 100% sure what settings I should be printing at to run out the profiling pages. We have two silk stocks and colotech+ uncoated.

I've got access to a very good spectrophotometer and can get the profiles made up for free - but it's not something we're going to be investing in ourselves unfortunately!


Anybody set up a 260 or a 250 with Device Link for accurate colour before?
 

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