Tuebingen/Birmingham – GMG, the world's leading color management solutions provider, announced today a partnership with Sun Chemical to integrate spot color definitions from the world's largest ink company into the GMG contone and halftone proofing solutions GMG ColorProof, FlexoProof and DotProof. The arrangement provides a means for GMG solutions to connect via the internet to the Sun Chemical SmartColour Engine, a centralized, spot-color database comprising over 250,000 identities. This is intended to result in more accurate spot color results on proofs, supporting the potential to drive the adoption of digital spot color definitions, in lieu of ink swatches or physical samples. GMG is in the process of developing several new integrated solutions, with further details to be announced later this year.

While the global packaging market continues to grow, brand owners and their supply chains are seeking more efficient approaches to communicating real, accurate, spot-color information within the value chain. Contract proofs are the preferred method to convey process-color information, but often the spot-color results refer to an attached chip or drawdown. With the newly announced partnership, there is a significant opportunity to instead rely upon a fully-digital spot-color workflow. As the product life cycle of consumer goods, for example, has become much shorter in recent years, new products are being developed and brought to market at a rapid rate. This in turn results in great time pressures for those involved in packaging design. Digitizing spot color management will noticeably shorten the approval procedure with brand owners and the response times of suppliers.

Sun Chemical has established strong partnerships with many leading brand owners, and has already realised the integration of their SmartColour Engine in leading packaging solutions, such as the Adobe Creative Suite.

Speaking on the announcement of the partnership, Paul Willems, CEO of GMG GmbH & Co. KG, said: "The already powerful GMG proofing solutions are now even more appealing for packaging service providers, including prepress and designers. With a large and growing base of established packaging users, the partnership is a means for GMG to better support current prepress customers, and an opportunity to also serve an increased number of packaging design companies."

Since 2007, Sun Chemical has been developing a central, web-based library of spot color information, including spectral data and various metadata, as well as tonal color and descriptive parameters. The data is used by leading brands as well as Sun's internal color matching operations to yield spot color inks that match brand and design expectations, and yield global consistency.

Patrice Aurenty, Global Leader of Sun Chemical's SmartColour group, commented: "Without the groundbreaking proofing technology that GMG provides, the adoption of a digital spot-color workflow is difficult to execute, especially on highly-chromatic colors as well as throughout the tonal range. Wider gamut inkjet technology, new substrates and color management technology have all converged to provide a technical platform that is capable of making full use of the Sun SmartColour platform, and we are particularly excited to be announcing this partnership today."

GMG's multiple award winning ColorProof contone proofing software and GMG FlexoProof/DotProof for halftone proofs, ensure that GMG's unrivaled quality and repeatability can be produced for these SmartColour spot colors definitions for flexographic, offset and gravure printing. Unlike many competitive products, GMG DotProof and GMG FlexoProof produce genuine, absolutely color-accurate halftone proofs by directly processing 1-bit imagesetter data, so that they can be inexpensively proofed on inkjet printers, and errors detected at an early stage.