The folk over at Melbourne's Abacus Print & Display may know how many beans make five, but something wasn't quite adding up in the colour department. Enter David Crowther, founder of Colour Graphic Services (CGS), to set their ICC profiles straight and win over some major brand work.
Abacus tasked the self-styled Colour Doctor to improve colour stability and accuracy late last year, and fortunately for them Crowther is one doctor who does make house calls. After an initial colour audit Crowther not only reported that he could improve Abacus' colour through both the Onyx and Versaworks rips, but that he could also match colour between solvent, UV flatbed and even the latex wide-format printers. According to Crowther, with the right profiling you can hit ISO 12647-2 on almost any gear.
- The Abacus team - Cam Armstrong, Michael Dyer, Rob Tennant, Rob Donsen, Jayson Armstrong
"When it comes to colour management, I am agnostic towards the device. All inks and toners have an achievable gamut and, once mapped, we know what we are dealing with and can make the necessary adjustment to ICC profiles for vaious ink/media/rip/print combinations," says Crowther.
ISO 12647-2 is an official offset standard so it cannot be certified in wide-format, but for Crowther the colour confidence is what it's all about. Starting with the HP Latex L25550 with a built-in i1 spectrophotometer, Crowther used the offset standard as a 'stake in the ground' for a complete spectral data profile. Using CGS's Mellow Colour PrintSpec software to create the profile Abacus was immediately able to expand its colour gamut on the machine, with smoother tonal gradations, achieving over 90% of the ISO 12647 standard.
Jayson Armstrong, production manager, Abacus Print & Display, said, "We were delighted with the improvement and so were our clients. It's so important to us at Abacus to deliver the very best and this gave us an edge in the market that was noticeable."
Abacus Print & Design handles a number of advertising agency clients representing major brand names, making accurate and wide-gamut colour quality a deciding factor when it comes to visual displays and signage closely matching with magazine and catalogue ads. When he saw what could be achieved, Armstrong bit the bullet and signed up for CGS's two-day CHROMAtrain course, giving the Abacus team all the tools to create their own profiles for any media.
"The amazing thing is that we are achieving very close matches between solvent, flatbed UV and Latex output - different inks, different curing, different printheads and rips, but it works. It takes about half a day to create a good ICC profile but the time is well worth the effort," said Armstrong.