Prior to the Year of COVID, one of the biggest industry trends in wide format and elsewhere had been automation, be it the physical automation of wide-format production using robotic arms and other mechanical means to move materials around, or the moving of files from intake through prepress, to production, and even to finishing—all untouched by human hands. A lot of this drive to automation had been due to difficulties in finding qualified staff to manually handle all of these processes. Color management is also not immune from the automation trend, especially as it requires more skill and knowledge than a lot of other prepress and production functions. And even in the realm of the experienced printer, color management—after all these years—remains a gray area.

“As we’ve seen over the last several years, the types of people that are working with print shops and working with RIP software has changed and evolved,” said Jonathan Rogers, International Marketing Manager for Onyx Graphics. “The reality is that color management and color matching are difficult, and require training. There’s a lot of this now new normal where owners are becoming operators, new people coming into the market are younger and they don’t have the time or maybe even the patience to do six months of color management research in order to fine-tune something.” Late last year, Onyx released version 21 of its flagship ONYX suite of prepress solutions. ONYX 21 includes Swatch Books 2.0, allowing users to print, scan, iterate, and report on an ideal color match, with options to add print mode-defined colors in a single click. “With [Swatch Books 2.0], we’ve tried to make it as simple, frontward-facing, and as interactive as possible,” said Rogers, “the idea being, how do we make it easier to match color? The main thing is to let ONYX do the work for you and take the guesswork out.”

Swatch Books 2.0, part of the new ONYX 21, aims to automate color management as much as possible.