Colour Management – have confidence in colour?

Colour Management

Our diligent attention to colour and its management ensures the depth of colour, vibrancy, and consistency of our graphic production, which is well above the industry standard, providing our clients with the best possible solution across a variety of print media.

We have sat down with our Studio Manager, James Gifford, who shares how we achieve consistent, vibrant colours in our work.

“What is colour management?”

“Colour management ensures accurate and consistent reproduction of images and brand colours across a whole range of media as every printer has a unique profile created for all media that it can run. The profile will capture the largest range of colours achievable for that particular material and resolution (gamut). This is updated regularly to ensure that it is aligned with how the printer and material are working together at that time. Using software to generate profiles means we can ensure that colours can be matched across multiple substrates and printing machines. Upon the start of a large project, the profiles can be re-linearised to ensure that in the event of emergency repairs or a switch in machinery, colours that were produced in the sample phase will still match exactly.”

“Why is colour management so important?”

“Our clients expect their artworks to look the same across a wide variety of formats, and that is something we can most definitely achieve! For instance, a customer’s artwork should be consistent across all applications whether on a bus, retail environment or football stadium. Consistent colour is needed on runs of many hundreds of prints, as any slight imperfections will be noticeable if they are placed side-by-side or compared to the original artwork. Our clients have the confidence in us that brand colours or signed off proofs can be matched, and this is extremely important when building trust in our service.”

“How do we achieve consistent, vibrant colours in our graphics work?”

“Well, regular profiling is the key to maintaining colour. Machines will naturally drift in colour, especially as the jets get older so at MacroArt, we treat profiling like regular maintenance. Profiling can be described as getting the best result possible from any printer/inks/material and ink limits can be adjusted to maximise vibrant colours as well as making sure we do not use more ink that we need to achieve the best results. One of the most important factors in profiling is the white point of the materials, as on casual inspection materials are white but placed next to each other it becomes obvious that there are a huge range of shades of white. This will of course affect how the colours are perceived when printed on and viewed.

Our continued investment in technically advanced printers combined with the expertise and technology of our pre-press studio, allows us to carefully monitor colour and resolution issues. Additionally, our colour control booth allows for accurate colour matching, which is essential for retail campaigns when matching to previously printed examples.”

Learn more about our production hub.