republic
Member
Recently, as a prepress person, I've come across jobs where I was asked to recreate parts of a paper system originally printed in spot colors on a stock with some form of color to it. Usually something like a brown-cast paper with specks in it. The customers had no idea what the spot color values were (or what the paper was, for that matter). The operating parameters from the customer have simply been to match the previous work. In both cases the spot colors were in the brown range, so the dark paper did not help matters.
We can eyeball the spot colors, of course, but how do you eyeball them correctly and subtract the cast of the paper to get the correct spot values? How do other printers and designers handle this? This has to be an age-old problem, but nobody in this shop seems to know an answer.
Recycled-looking earthy papers seem to be making more of a comeback (at least locally), so this seems like its a problem that will repeat itself. And the past two jobs have led to rejections / added customer frustration (especially from new customers where their old printer simply handled all those pesky production details). Would love to have a process to resolve this.
We can eyeball the spot colors, of course, but how do you eyeball them correctly and subtract the cast of the paper to get the correct spot values? How do other printers and designers handle this? This has to be an age-old problem, but nobody in this shop seems to know an answer.
Recycled-looking earthy papers seem to be making more of a comeback (at least locally), so this seems like its a problem that will repeat itself. And the past two jobs have led to rejections / added customer frustration (especially from new customers where their old printer simply handled all those pesky production details). Would love to have a process to resolve this.
