Kennesaw, Ga. - Heidelberg USA will present a technical seminar discussing “Expanding Color in Print & Packaging,” at the Printing Industries Alliance Vendor Fair and Mixer on Wednesday, March 25 at the Buffalo Marriott in Amherst, N.Y. from 4:30-5:30 p.m. Joseph Suffoletto, Program Manager, Prinect Color Services and author of the “Color Management Handbook, A Practical Guide,” will conduct the seminar, which will introduce participants to Heidelberg’s Multicolor Workflow concept, including the new Multicolor Toolset.

Recipes for Success

“Multicolor Workflow” refers to the addition of one, two or three colors—typically, Orange, Green, and Violet or Blue—to the standard CMYK inkset. This enlarges the color gamut and enables printing at a higher level of quality for RGB conversions into the Pantone space. The results are vivid, saturated colors that in most cases are indistinguishable from the original Pantone spot colors.

Printers who employ Multicolor no longer need to print with Pantone colors, a costly process that entails loading spot color inks into the press, driving the press to color, then cleaning and reloading ink for every subsequent color. The Multicolor Toolset allows the printer to standardize a multi-unit offset press with a 5-, 6- or 7-color inkset, eliminating these steps and reducing down times simply by continuing to print using the standard process colors. Printers not only can increase their profitability, but also cut their procurement and warehousing costs. 

“The major emphasis for printers is to excite brand owners and consumers with cleaner, more saturated colors on their product’s labels and packaging, which is outside the normal four-color process color reproduction,” said Jim Ross, Senior Technical Support Specialist, Prinect Color Services, Heidelberg USA. “A major packaging printer recently tested a 7-color process inkset comprising the standard CMYK, together with Violet, Green, and Orange with water-based gloss coating in one pass. The addition of the three colors expanded the overall color gamut by 30 percent, compared with standard 4-color process, ultimately rendering the spot build combinations cleaner and more accurate to the Pantone Plus library.”

Images that Jump Off the Page

In addition to being very flexible and stable, the Multicolor methodology uses a 7-color open ICC profile in the prepress workflow without requiring any changes to established processes. The Multicolor Toolset can be used with both the Heidelberg workflow and other standard packaging workflows. This efficiency and color predictability is a major benefit to the entire design, planning, pre-production, and printing processes.

“The Multicolor Toolset has given us the knowledge and opportunity to reduce the number of spot colors printed on press by replacing these colors with 7-color process,” said Amy Jungerberg, Prepress Manager for longtime Prinect user Inland (La Crosse, Wis.) “This is becoming more and more favorable to our customers, as it helps them reduce costs. The system also gives us the ability to make better color decisions with our customers up front. As a result, customers receive predictable color from proof to press, while we benefit from reduced makeready and fewer press changeovers.”

The Multicolor Toolset provides the “recipe” needed to produce the spot colors using the standard process colors.  Using the actual 7-color press profile, it calculates the colorimetric Delta E (color difference) values of the respective color swatch compared to the referenced color library. The user will be able to see a preview of the Multicolor make-up compared to the original color, thus providing full visual control.This reduces color corrections and proofing cycles, ultimately increasing proofing accuracy and predictability for customer-approved comps, initial product marketing and first press color approvals. The resulting sharpness, fidelity and expanded color gamut of the printed press sheet are all impressive, as the images appear to jump off the page.

More Custom Colors in Less Time

With advanced controls in multi-channel separation techniques, the Multicolor Toolset facilitates the printing of a range of problematic colors such as purples, greens, and browns or flesh tones. Users can easily change custom Pantone colors into 7-color process and print every job with ink that is already in the press. The addition of Orange, Green and Violet lets packaging and label printers create hundreds of custom colors with less makeready time and lower waste.