Digital proofing and color management

Market pressure

Once upon a time, when customers sent proofs to the printing factory, they had to make sure that the overlays were accurate. As a result, due to paper absorption or mechanical reasons, some prints were still slightly inferior; now, the customer stated on the inkjet proofs: Color printing. Accurate printing is a basic requirement for customers to accept printed products. Color is the focus of customers' attention. Color is one of the methods used by consumers to differentiate between genuine and fake products, and it is also a customer's wealth. Color management thus becomes very important.

Low-grade print supplies exceed demand, and high-quality prints are lured by lucrative profits. Whoever has mastered color management will have a high-end print market.

Liu Mingming

Due to the popularity of four-color and multi-color offset presses, plus the application of alcohol dampening systems and waterless offset printing, overprinting accuracy is no problem. However, the problem of how to accurately restore colors caused the captains to make trouble, but it also caused headaches for technical managers. The high-quality production management and printing process standardization, standardization, and dataization were known to us 10 years ago. However, in the same month, it is too difficult to implement. The popularity of service concepts at the first time, reluctant to use digital proofing instead of traditional proofing gradually gains popularity, coupled with the broad prospects for the development of CTP, digital proofing system, comprehensive management has attracted increasing attention.

Understanding Digital Proofing

In digital proofing, the most important thing is the predictable printing color and the imitation of printed materials. The customer provides color inkjet proofs and corresponding digital files. The applied image processing software, printers, inks, and other aspects are all different. Therefore, the digital files must be adjusted and corrected. Digital proofing is a system that replaces traditional proofing, and its hardware and software are relatively fixed (including consumables) and cannot be arbitrarily replaced, otherwise its value will be greatly reduced.

In order to match the actual process conditions, prepress digital proofing technology is open and modifiable. There are many factors that affect color reproduction. Aside from the reality of printing equipment, the importance of the stability and manageability of digital pre-press proofing is not so important.

How to narrow the gap between digital proofing and final print is the most concern for users. Digital proofing system integrators provide users with a large number of printed ICC files. These files do not come from the user's own printers. Therefore, the optimization of ICC files is indispensable, the ease of use, and the friendly ICC file creation interface are naturally users. One of the important basis for the purchase system.

Secondly, the formulation of ICC documents is often based on data collected by color densitometers and spectrophotometers and is greatly affected by light sources. I personally think that the percentage of outlets should be the main target of collection, supplemented by the necessary control over the density of the field. This makes the printer or printer ICC file more practical, because the color of the print is expressed by the percentage of dots, but also by the inherent color of the light source and the substrate, and the digital proofing system has a similar concept.

With the real network proofing technology and related hardware and software outlets, the application of color management software automatically compares digital proofing with printed matter, and generates or modifies digital proofing ICC documents, which eventually makes digital proofing and printed matter tend to be the same. By simulating the experimental production of actual printing conditions (ink, paper, printing equipment, production site environment), a limited number of time-proven digital proofing ICC files are produced to achieve the purpose of simulating printing colors.

The digital proofing system undoubtedly finds a breakthrough in the application of color management in proofing. Of course, comprehensive color management should also include color control before printing and printing. Only the printing process can realize standardization and data management, and it can support comprehensive management in a large environment.