True Colors

Of all the mission-critical elements involved in package production, one of the most critical remains color process control. Prepress professionals, print service providers, designers, and others involved in print production have historically struggled to control and manage color. In the packaging realm, the struggle to achieve consistent color has been elevated to a business imperative as the role of packaging shifts from that of a receptacle for the product inside to a key element in selling the product.

Keep it calibrated

“Color process control needs to be a priority for professionals in any organization who take quality seriously,” says Arjen van der Meulen, director of color, enterprise solutions for Kodak’s -Graphic Communications Group. Color calibration, which encompasses calibrating all processes and devices to a predetermined standard, is a prerequisite for color process control, which aims to maintain those processes and devices in their appropriately calibrated state. Adds van der Meulen, “Color calibration is an essential part of color process control, and is just one of many tasks that needs regular attention to ensure a successful packaging workflow.”

According to Jennifer Garvis, worldwide director of marketing for X-Rite, “If you have a process or device that is properly calibrated, and you are using good process control for consistency, the same process can then be profiled; that profile can be used to make prepress proofing devices match actual printing processes, thus ensuring accurate color communication and reproduction.” Adds Chuck Koehler, color specialist with Heidelberg U.S., “Should [such] monitoring reveal that there is variation greater than allowable tolerances, the information can be used to readjust the initial calibrations.”

Materials created in the prepress department can make or break a press run. Errors in packaging preproduction can be carried through and multiplied across the various print disciplines, substrates, and color sets employed to identify a given brand and its brand extensions. This could have disastrous—and costly—consequences in terms of time, labor, waste, and rework.

“Considering the color management aspect of quality control, the first priority that comes to mind is the deployment of appropriate spectrophotometers and densitometers,” van der Meulen says. “This is true not only in the prepress department, but also in the pressroom, where these instruments can objectively measure color and must be part of regular process control.”

The right toolset

Fortunately, a profusion of such tools—some standalone, some integrated—is available to reduce the risks associated with complex, multicolor package printing by detecting and measuring color changes at various stages of the workflow. In addition to densitometers and spectrophotometers, other instrumentation includes colorimeters, chart readers, plate readers, and profile creation software, as well as camera-based systems designed to measure plates and confirm dot structure and accuracy.