Proofing Settings When the Printer is Clueless?

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    • #74030

      Hi all,

      Hopefully this is considered InDesign-related but I’m not sure where else to turn. My office recently purchased an Epson Artisan 1430 to proof InDesign jobs that will be sent to a digital press, and occasionally an offset press. Still working on getting them to approve a calibration device like Color Munki for the printer. My monitor is calibrated as I brought my i1 Display from home. I know the Artisan 1430 doesn’t have the under-the-hood tech to process PANTONE swatches natively, and some of the other functions of a pro proofing printer, but it’s the nicest one the company would buy, so I need to make it work as well as it can.

      I read David’s [very informative] post about pre-flighting for well-managed colors, which has gotten me to the point where proofs are “close” to what I would expect, but still enough difference from what we get back that I feel like there’s way too much guess work. The problem is, I reached out to the two print vendors the company works with to ask for ICC profiles, and neither were able to provide them, or even seemed to know what color profile I should select other than to call out my PANTONEs specifically as spots and send jobs as CMYK. They said SWOP coated is fine, but when I do that for a soft-proof and simulate paper color, both the screen and the printout look like old newspaper, so I must be doing something wrong there.

      I know at least that the digital print vendor uses Xerox iGen. Are there provided profiles like GRACOL or the other available options that will better approximate the end result in InDesign from a digital printer, or is it that I’m using the wrong print settings in InDesign for the proofs? I have all printer-based color management turned off and am using the profiles for the appropriate paper in InDesign, as well as giving the printer an RGB composite. Thanks for any help you can provide!

    • #74031

      I am by no means an expert on color management, but the print shop I work at just hired an expert. He set things up so every CMYK job to every device is converted to a GRACOL profile.

      We print on an HP Indigo, which is also our proofer for our offset press.

      I gave up on trying to match screen to press; there are too many variables, so I just adjust colors/saturation to the printed proofs.

    • #74034
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Well, first of all, you can do all the color management you want on your end, but if your printers say things like “swop coated is fine” then your workflow is a deadend. It’s like ballroom dancing with a mannequin.

      Second, you can’t get accurate proofs of many spot colors (e.g. many Pantone colors). It cannot be done on a desktop printer and isn’t worth worrying about. If you’re printing a CMYK job (such as on a digital press), then you want to use CMYK colors, not spot colors.

    • #74073

      Thanks for your help. David, I especially like your analogy about dancing with the mannequin. The proofs don’t need to be clinically accurate, but I’d like to get closer than where I am now and I feel like it should be possible. The printer that uses the digital press still asks that we specifically call out any Pantones we want matched even though the final output is CMYK. I believe this is because the iGen digital printer has a custom CMYK mix for many Pantones that is supposed to be more accurate than the software conversion of spot to CMYK. To add insult to injury, though, there is a specific color that is used for my company’s branding, Pantone 7659, but it looks nothing like what it should when viewed on-screen, so I end up using the company’s defined custom CMYK mix 48/90/10/55 for all my projects (particularly because some of our printing companies prefer files with Pantones even though they will later be converted, but others require all spots to CMYK beforehand).

      Can any of you recommend a more in-depth resources on color management from screen to proof to press? I have so many more questions in this area I feel I should know the answers to, like when I browse Pantones in InDesign/Illustrator why do they always look washed out/bland on a calibrated monitor? Is the Pantone swatch book the only way to tell what you’re going to get? Appreciate being pointed in the right direction. Thanks again!

    • #74081
      Colin Flashman
      Participant

      I suspect the reason your printer is asking for spots to remain as spots (even on a Digital Press) is because Fiery RIP software has an ability to change how a specific colour channel looks without effecting the appearance of the rest of the document.

      For example – a brochure that is largely full colour and all the colour looks fine, but contains a PANTONE 295 logo that – when comparing to the swatches – looks too purple, can easily be adjusted by going into the spot colour settings of the Fiery RIP and adjusting the target colour values for the 295 in particular. If the 295 is forced/set up to process in the artwork, that level of control is lost by the printer.

      We see this a lot at my work where clients have a particular colour associated with their brands and this is one way of controlling the appearance of the colours. With colours like Orange 021, no digital printer using CMYK only will ever get close, but the Fiery control can beat the forced-to-process colour generated by InDesign. We also see this when clients have supplied purely CMYK art and delivered a proof, only for the proof to be rejected because a brand doesn’t meet their colour specifications or previously printed offset sample that we weren’t aware of.

      What I can say about digital colour is that print providers (like me) have to calibrate the printers daily (if not twice or thrice daily) to maintain colour consistency as parts of the machine can change through constant use. So even away from InDesign and Photoshop, maintaining consistent colour on a digital press is not as easy as one would think.

      One thing I will say based on reading the thread is stop relying on the screen to expect what you want on print in terms of spot colours. The screen won’t be able to display pantone swatches accurately as it is likely that they will be out of the gamut of the monitor, just as some CMYK colours will be. Pantone swatches are one thing, but pantone inks were originally intended for offset presses printing in ink that is absorbed through paper, not heated toner that sits on the top of the paper and thus isn’t absorbed into the paper.

      Colour calibration issues discussed on IDS often relate to “should I use RGB/CMYK” and the debate is polarising… but this largely relates to the appearance of full colour artwork and not spot colour artwork.

    • #74118

      Wow, thank you for the explanation, Colin. I’m sure the Fiery unit is the exact reason our main printer wants the Pantones called out.

      I’m not too worried about photographs matching perfectly from screen to inkjet to digital printer; the jobs are primarily for real estate agents, so as long as there’s not some drastic shift in the color, some variance in the photos is perfectly acceptable. As David has pointed out in the past, InDesign converts photos to CMYK beautifully most of the time.

      At this point, based on some test prints I have run with the new printer, I’m leaning toward just making manual adjustments in the printer calibration. I know the proof will never match exactly, but real estate agents are mainly visual people, so would like to get as close as possible given the equipment we’re working with.

      Would it help to purchase a Pantone swatch book to show them the expected spot color output, given the Fiery unit’s ability to match many of them?

    • #74153
      Colin Flashman
      Participant

      As I mention in my last post, Pantone Swatches are designed to work for offset presses – not Digital Printing. Put simply, with the few exceptions I list later in this reply, your spot colours are ALWAYS going to be made from CMYK, despite the Fiery RIP attempting to do a conversion.

      Printers should already have swatch books on-site, so purchasing a swatch book will only show you the target colour of a premixed ink on a final offset print using the particular spot colour. It won’t show you how the colour will look from a digital press.

      Again, as I mention in my last post, colours like Orange 021, no digital printer using CMYK only will EVER get close. By “matching” colours on a digital copiers, I use this term loosely… this is what I mean: https://www.colorfulcanary.com/2013/12/nailed-it-wordless-wednesday.html

      Only a few copiers can produce true spot colours in the sense that they are using a fifth unit on the machine filled with a custom colour. Such copiers/printers are the HP Indigo; Kodak Nexpress; or Xerox iGen (apologies if I’ve missed any makes/models). These digital copiers have the ability to run spot channels through them IF the inks are made for the machine and IF the printer has chosen to use this method. And HP Indigo is the ONLY digital exception to the rule in that it DOES use ink rather than dry toner.

      TL;DR – You’re setting yourself up for failure by using Pantone Inks on digital prints. Instead, get your printer to print these pages https://docs-hoffmann.de/swatch22112002.pdf and then choose the colours from these pages based on the CMYK values given on the colours.

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