New colour consultancy service for printers

According to Harry Kontogiannis, global services business manager (Graphic Systems), the aim is to deliver at least two service options to the industry from a trained team of colour consultants. “We will be able to offer colour management advice that will tie your monitor to the proofer, or at a different level take it all the way to the press,”
he said.

The initiative comes in response to a perceived industry need for better colour control and the lack of uniform standards and levels of expertise. CMS Consultancy service will let Agfa’s experts and engineers analyse the entire flow of image files from initial delivery to the printed result.

The consultants will provide practical guidelines for standardising and optimising colour accuracy and consistency throughout the production process. While the use of colour images is increasing, accuracy and consistency are often compromised because there are no universal standards in place to ensure the quality and consistency of the printed output.

Advertisers supply images to commercial printers or newspaper publishers in a variety of formats. Different printers and publishers use different systems to translate these formats, making it difficult to predict how images will be printed. This puts printers in a complicated situation with clients, and publishers are disadvantaged when pitching for advertising revenue.

Agfa’s CMS Consultancy service helps commercial printers, magazine and newspaper publishers select and apply standard formats and processes. This will automate image reproduction so that every image supplied will be printed predictably, accurately and identically, regardless of the prepress and printing equipment, software and consumables.

The Colour Management Consultancy Plan will include practical recommendations for implementation, which the printer may choose to have Agfa’s experts supervise in a second phase.

According to Harry Kontogiannis the service will be available in Australia this quarter with New Zealand to follow shortly afterwards. He is also planning to make the colour profiling service available to the large format poster printing sector where critical colour as opposed to ‘pleasant colour’ is not such an issue.