*** Golden Nugget #21: The Reality of Remote Color Diagnostics ***
While at the PIA/GATF Color Management Conference earlier this month I had a chance to visit with a customer who uses our new ProofPass.com proof certification and remote color diagnostics solution. Our customer is responsible for the operations of a large pre-press facility and for this article we will call him John Smith.
Recently John was out of the office at a user’s group conference for another piece of critical equipment or software in his facility. John got a frantic call from the office that recently produced proofs could not be matched on press. John’s first concern was to check on the current state of his inkjet proofing system. He asked that a new proof be made and scanned into the ProofPass.com database.
Because the ProofPass.com database is internet based, John was able to login to the ProofPass.com web-site with his account information and see the color of the swatches just measured along with almost every print metric a person could wish for. The visual swatches in ProofPass.com proved to be the key to solving this problem. Before John even started looking at the delta E numbers he could see that the side-by-side color comparison of the reference proof (gold standard) and the recently produced proof did not match.
Obviously doing this comparison on a color calibrated monitor in proper viewing conditions aids in the correctness of the colors being viewed. Remember, however, that ProofPass.com is not intended to display “contract color” but instead to provide the user a visual reference of the relative color difference between two color swatches.
The shift observed was quite large, and in the overall direction of a much “warmer” proof. While almost every swatch passed the delta E test in place (I believe John has since tightened his delta E tolerances) it was this overall shift vs a single patch shifting that was causing the problem. John runs a simple device next to the inkjet proofer that plots both temperature and humidity over time. In the period of time that the color problem had occurred humidity had dropped from about 60% to 20%.
In conclusion, remote color is clearly the most exciting technology to hit our industry in many years. While we have all seen the potential of remote “soft proofing” I believe the broader category of remote color is going to provide much of the excitement and growth in our industry over the next five years. It promises to be a heck of a ride, so climb aboard and let’s see where it takes us.