Competitive Edge Also stepping up to offer advice is Ray Weiss, vice president of eLearning and certifications for the PRINTING United Alliance. He says colour management is not optional, but instead something that can give your business a competitive edge. “Think about the last time a customer called to complain about colour,” he says, adding: “Maybe the banner didn’t match the display, or a reorder looked nothing like the original. That call costs you time, materials, and credibility. In most cases, it was preventable. Colour management isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s the difference between running a shop that reprints jobs and one that gets it right the first time.” Weiss goes on to say that in dayto-day print and sign production, poor colour management shows up as wasted substrate, overconsumption of ink, and customers who do not come back. On this, he says the real cost is not the reprint but the customer who quietly takes their next job somewhere else. So, what should printers and signThe automation coming down the pipe will make accurate colour more accessible than ever makers have to hand? Weiss says consistent, repeatable colour starts with a spectrophotometer, adding that if you are still relying on your eyes to evaluate colour, even perfect vision is affected by fatigue, lighting, and age, meaning you need objective data. “Beyond the device, you need a process,” he explains, continuing: “The colour management pyramid — starting with your environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, clean power, and working up through printer calibration, ink limits, linearisation, and finally ICC profiling — gives you a structured path to follow. Each step builds on the last. A great profile sitting atop a poorly calibrated printer is like a GPS giving you perfect directions to the wrong destination.” Planning ahead, Weiss says colour management is getting smarter, with AI increasingly being integrated into print workflows, automating colour calibration, and helping predict equipment maintenance needs. Weiss highlights RIP software such as Onyx Graphics and EFI Fiery that integrate AI-driven colour profiling and cloud-based job management, allowing users to automate more repetitive tasks and reduce errors. This, he says, means shops will spend less time chasing colour and more time producing, adding cloud-based verification tools are making it easier to track trends over time and catch drift before it becomes a problem. “The fundamentals aren’t changing; you still need a good process, the right tools, and trained people,” he says, concluding: “But the automation coming down the pipe will make accurate colour more accessible than ever. The shops that build good habits now will be the ones best positioned to take advantage of it.” The stand-out theme running throughout this feature is ignore colour management tools at your own risk. While printers and sign-makers are indeed a talented bunch with an eye for detail, they should be making use of the innovative tools at their disposal to achieve the best possible colour quality in their work. Colour management relies on ICC profiles, a global standard maintained by the International Colour Consortium, or the ICC Factoid ▼RayWeiss, vice president of eLearning and certifications for the PRINTING United Alliance COLOUR MANAGEMENT | ROB FLETCHER 56 email: editor@signlink.co.uk Issue 265 - June | July
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