As part of Digital Colour Management Month, Sawgrass explains three types of applications for colour management that every product decorator should know about.
ICC Profiles
An International Colour Consortium (ICC) profile is a set of data that ensures that when a specific colour is selected on the computer screen, the designated colour is consistently and correctly delivered on the substrate.
Think of it as a colour-matching programme, since the screen colour rarely produces the same colour output. A profile creates a link between specific screen colours and specific output colours. It doesn’t change the colour, rather it ensures the correct output for a given input.
To use this method, you must work with ICC-compliant graphic software (e.g. Photoshop, Corel). The profile will be placed in the output stage of printing and the manufacturer’s print driver will be set to ‘No Colour Adjustment.’ This setup will colour correct the image and then send the data to the printer without affecting the colours further.
Colour correction profiles for dye sublimation have their own unique challenges. Under normal profile creation, when a printer has printed out the colour swatch for testing, the profiling software knows how to adjust the colours to print out the correct ones.
When a dye sublimation transfer is pressed onto a substrate, the ink turns into a gas, and while in this state, the colour properties change.
This change during sublimation can be quite dramatic (e.g. some blues look like green on paper), and it is, therefore, impossible to judge whether the print is correct or not until it is sublimated onto the final substrate.
It is necessary to create custom sublimation profiles and print management applications of these profiles to create the correct sublimated colour, not the colour on the printed transfer.
Custom Print Drivers
Custom print drivers are programmes that have colour correction built into the printer control system. The advantage of these programmes is that colour correction is performed at the print driver stage, and they are generally easier and less technical to use than an ICC profile.
For Virtuoso HD Product Decorating Systems, Sawgrass offers Virtuoso Print Manager for SG400, SG800 and VJ 628 printers. Virtuoso Print Manager makes getting great colour output easy with CorelDraw, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Silhouette and CreativeStudio design software for both Windows and Mac OS.
The software’s integrated RIP-like tools help streamline production with an advanced array of features, including job and image nesting, hot folders with customisable presets, multilingual user interface, file and web-to-print workflows and more.
Raster Image Processor
More technically savvy product decorators may choose to use Raster Image Processing (RIP) software, which includes ICC profile creation capabilities for managing colours. Simply put, RIPs convert images into individual dots (rasterising) and sends these rasterised files to the printer.
The process of creating ICC profiles from scratch is time consuming, requires a good understanding of colour science and is an art form in itself. It begins with printing a linearised colour palette. A spectrophotometer is then used to measure the colours.
From these data points, the software creates an algorithm that calculates the colour space and generates the ICC profile. Various types of images are then printed on a variety of substrates, and the profile is meticulously adjusted to optimise the final result.
RIP software also handles workflow tasks, such as nesting images and batching or queuing files to print. RIPs are available from a number of software companies, including Wasatch and Ergosoft. Sawgrass recommends the use of Wasatch SoftRIP with the VJ 628 for users looking for a more advanced colour management and production solution.
JG ELECTRONICS (+27 11) 789 6033 https://www.jgelectronics.com/
