Color management knowledge that printing operators must understand (Part 1)

Poor printers, they are at the end of the "food chain" of printing production, and customers are always picking and demanding print quality in front of them. Will color management technology make them better off? Can it replace the technology that has long made the condition of printing operators more difficult?

From alcohol-free dampening to waterless offset printing to FM screening technology, printing industry R & D personnel provide printing operators with a series of new products and technologies, but they also limit the freedom and choice of printing operations. Despite this, printing operators still hope to master these new technologies and integrate them well with printing machines to meet the matching requirements of various proofs.

SWOP (Rotary Printing Process Specification Parameters) states that the primary responsibility of the printer is to restore the appearance of proofs. SWOP provides some guidelines that should be followed in rotary printing to help printers perform this role. When the printing house receives electronic documents, films and standard proofs, it should confirm that there are no changes or losses during the handover. All elements and components should be in the best condition and meet the requirements of various standards. When receiving electronic documents, the printer must deal with these documents in accordance with the standards and confirm that there will be no problems during printing, such as the loss of some graphic elements or the appearance of moiré. When the received material or electronic file does not meet the requirements of the standard, such as SWOP, or is inconsistent with the provided sample, the printer must notify the publisher or the pre-press department of the inconsistency or error, and the printing cannot meet the restoration standard possibility.

Since printing is at the end of the production process, it is the responsibility of the printer to ensure that the final printing results are satisfactory to everyone. The operator before the printing process can also produce with a certain tolerance, and the printer must accurately realize the printing reduction.

The application of color management technology has a great influence on the operation of the printer. We all know that color is a subjective factor, and everyone deals with colors differently. As mentioned in SWOP, the old process system mainly relies on manual adjustment, input variables (such as film, documents, proofs, etc.) are considered to be the best control and management. The printer completes the printing tasks according to the instructions. The entire production process everything is normal. But in fact, the printer is responsible for ensuring customer satisfaction, not just to complete the quantity, this is their responsibility. The concept of working according to the number of prints is only suitable for printing low-end products, while commercial printing must rely on the superb manual work and experience of the operator.

The printing process is so complicated that it is difficult for printers to deal with all aspects of the problem. The processes faced by printers are full of uncertainties and undefinable conditions and problems. They have to copy thousands of colors, which will change continuously with different originals. Usually the manuscript contains a wider color gamut, and the appearance of the color is critical for some customers. These conditions require printers to reproduce manuscripts in a limited printing color space, and to reproduce as much as possible the colors on thousands of manuscripts. The discerning customer will pay more attention to the image and pay attention to the color on the image.

In order to better identify the color of the printed image, the customer usually sends an expert to track the printing process. These experts should have accurate "color" eyes and be able to distinguish more colors and levels of detail. Although everyone's perception of color is different, it is impossible to reach a completely consistent view, and the control of the entire printing process by these experts can greatly simplify the uncertainty of production. They verbally describe the visual changes of the printed image, not only requiring the printed matter to accurately match the original, but also sometimes requiring the printer to create a better image color than the original. Since no one can specifically describe how to make the image quality better, each printing operation itself is a different process. This is what people usually refer to as "drawing on a printing press".

Printer operators have only a few ways to adjust color changes. During the printing process, they can increase or decrease the thickness of the ink layer, sometimes they can change the printing color sequence, and sometimes they can adjust the viscosity of the ink. These are rough adjustments, which can not make the color appear more subtle color changes, and often cause more problems than they can solve.

When people buy printed materials (ink and paper), they usually take price as a benchmark, because printed materials occupy a considerable part of the printing cost. But as the so-called price-for-price-for-goods, cheap printing consumables usually bring negative effects on color reproduction and stable printing production.

In addition, there is a "proud" process adjustment technology, which is the expansion of the network, also known as the increase in tone value. The introduction of this concept initially provided the printer with another method of testing the printing process. But unfortunately, people intuitively think that the ideal copy is to print 50% of the dot area to 70% -75%. Therefore, printing press operators do everything possible to adjust the printing process in order to minimize dot enlargement. The printing operator always artificially prints images that are as clear as possible. The size of the outlets, many people also persuaded their customers to accept this limit on quality. In this process, their printing process was pushed to an extreme, but also brought a lot of trouble to normal printing production.

So what changes will color management bring? The answer is everything. As mentioned above, the traditional printing process is complicated, so change is not necessarily a bad thing. At least using color management can try to define replication quality in a measurable way and provide a tool to better serve customers. But on the other hand, because the printing press is the last end of the process, the printer must bear the ultimate responsibility for qualified prints, so every new technology must be adopted carefully.

The overall concept of color management printing is to use the printing press as an option for stable output, and use the lookup table to match the printing color with the sample color (or other options). The key word is "stable".

The process including color management requires that every time the printing press is produced, the printing color can be kept stable and consistent. The printing industry has tried to define how various variables in printing affect the stable operation of the printing press. The operator always establishes some printing conditions to optimize the size of the color space, and then strives to match the sample.

At present, the most commonly used method is to print various types of standard printer test paper (test color block table) with a given paper and ink, determine the printing process conditions, and read the data of each color block on the test table with a special tool. Establish a look-up table to optimize the output process of the printing press, maximize the printing color space, and establish predictable printing conditions in this way. This is the earliest color management attempt and provides later mature color management technology. Great help.

Many printing houses identify the characteristics of their printing presses by printing color codes such as IT8.7 / 4. In the same way, they can also optimize the scanning of input documents or the information of digital proofing systems. But even if the device's profile is used, coupled with some ICC guidelines, the system replication is improved, but this is not true color management.

This is just the application of more sophisticated tools to fine-tune the old production process. As mentioned above, such adjustments have been much better than before, and there is no problem, and the company has also received its due return. But in view of the following two points, we still have to say that this is not a complete color management.

First of all, in this process, the system is not responsible for the transfer of color, it is only an internal closed system, the purpose is to optimize the old system; from the outside, there is no obvious change. Even if the printing house explained to the customer that this is a color management process, they still have to constantly exchange proofs and rely on their eyes to confirm the color of each link in the process.

This "color management" can only tighten the degree of color reproduction, but still rely on visual judgment to control this process, because the system cannot monitor and improve itself, let alone pass color information between two independent parties.

Second, the job of the printing press operator has not changed. All they have to do is print the image as soon as possible, and then continue to print with the customer's previous intervention. The only thing they want is to provide the customer with an independent product that is consistent with the original.

Pets Toys

Interactive Cat Toys,Toys For Dogs,Dog Chew Toys,Dog Toys For Puppies

NINGBO BRIGHT MAX CO., LTD. , https://www.smartrider-horsecare.com