In print and packaging production, there are many factors that affect the ability to successfully meet the expectations of a client. They include good design, content accuracy, proper file creation, and processing to mention a few. However, color management is the critical component of any reproduction process, especially as it relates to brand identity. In fact, it is one of the key technologies that have helped foster the growth of digital printing and packaging. Predicting and achieving consistent color across disparate presses and platforms is something we have started to take for granted thanks to the work of the ICC (International Color Consortium). However, today in print reproduction, whether it’s for commercial or packaging use, we tend to look at color effect in a fairly limited way, strictly by “the numbers,” and in a two-dimensional reality, when color appearance is really affected by three dimensions. 

I have been involved in color management and reproduction since the mid 1970s and have always been guided by the basic premise that in four-color reproduction, the media is the fifth color. Obviously, if it is more than four-color printing, the media is still the  n+1 color. In fact, almost all of the color management tools and support infrastructure built into today’s design and reproduction software and hardware is built on that premise. When you build a characterization (aka color profile) of a printer, it is based on not just the printer and its colorants, but also the specific media you are profiling, because the media affects the color. As most of you have seen in image reproductions on a gloss coated vs. uncoated paper, the texture and absorption of the substrate material can play a significant role in color appearance. The existing tools and systems have done a pretty good job at identifying those differences, but as print applications expand beyond conventional media, for example in packaging and industrial applications, we are starting to outgrow them and need to look at color appearance.

Color appearance is affected by a number of variables including (but not limited to) the spectral value of the color, the viewing conditions, and ultimately the perceptual aspects of human color vision. The science of color appearance is really not new. In fact, it has been used in product manufacturing for years. Getting different elements of different materials and surface characteristics manufactured in different plants to match in a car, or on an appliance is commonplace.