Océ Color Control Suite A NEW PATH TO CONSISTENT COLOR

Transcription

1 Océ Color Control Suite A NEW PATH TO CONSISTENT COLOR The solution for reproducible color output across media, print processes, and geographies

2 COLOR MANAGEMENT FOR THE REAL WORLD The Color Challenge Color can define a brand. Think Tiffany & Co. blue, Coca- Cola red and UPS brown. Because of the important role color plays in brand recognition, corporations often have exacting standards for color replication. To protect the brand, consistent replication is required regardless of the channel. For print service providers, color can be a vexing challenge with many variables. First, the perception of color is unique to the individual. Viewing conditions also affect how we perceive color. The same color can look different when viewed under fluorescent light as compared to daylight. Finally, the medium in which the color is rendered a computer monitor versus a printed sheet can also affect its perception. Whether printing offset or digital, the process of managing color is a multi-step, continuous process. Print service providers commonly struggle to allocate the necessary time and resources. At the same time, delivering consistent and repeatable color across an entire fleet of equipment has only increased the complexity. Some of the color management challenges faced by printing companies include: An advanced skillset with adequate experience is typically required to understand the process and use the tools required to manage color. However, color management is usually delegated as an extra task to someone within the prepress department, who gives it a lower priority over preparing files for job output. Due to the level of mergers and acquisitions within the industry, some service providers find themselves needing to manage color across geographically dispersed production facilities. Managing color over multiple sites includes the need to centralize data, validate output, and manage an extended fleet of equipment. A growing number of industry standards must be met and documented. The Color Solution Océ Color Control helps print service providers to establish reproducible color output that is independent of the operators or their skillset. Océ Color Control Suite makes for better business, allowing you to offer consistent color output, time and time again. Océ Color Control is a comprehensive color management toolbox focused on capturing, calibrating, characterizing, and confirming color. The suite works with any printing device inkjet, toner, or offset providing a single point of color management control throughout a print shop. These powerful tools enable color consultants and color specialists to achieve best-in-class color mapping across papers, printers, and workflow processes. Automating critical color processes and quality management to monitor and document tolerances can reduce waste, improve print quality, and communicate color accuracy to customers. Improve print quality, reduce waste and communicate color accuracy Process control requires staying within defined tolerances. Océ Color Control enables the quality manager to monitor and document long-term quality trends, analysis, and corrections. This not only allows Canon customers to establish internal quality management, but also enables them to communicate it to their end-customers. 2

3 Choose Your Color Control Océ Color Control is available in two versions. Océ Color Control Basic contains quality assurance tools to optimize and maintain consistent and repeatable color output; output which strongly depends on the combination of printer, ink, and paper. Océ Color Control Basic allows print providers to demonstrate their workflow and color competence to internal and external parties using industry standard certification procedures. Catch Statistics viewer Wedge CMYK 2.0 Catch automatically determines optimal ink limit settings independent of operator skills and matches quality levels of multiple printer sites, helping to ensure the consistency of the printed piece throughout the enterprise. Use the Océ Color Control ink limit functionality to optimize ink usage on inkjet production engines while still producing customer acceptable output quality. Statistics is a module for Océ Color Control Catch, which allows for analyzing quality control jobs. All measurements, for which a quality control protocol has been created, are transferred to the statistics module automatically. Now you can check different criteria and compare them over time even for non-coherent timeframes. Océ Color Control Suite includes the basic package along with additional advanced tools to automate ink limit determination, paper alignment, printer park alignment, and digital workflows. The Océ Color Control Suite allows print providers and color specialists to generate high-end ICC or device link profiles to strive for best-in-class color mapping across papers and printers or even different sites. The following offers an in-depth look at each of the five modules that go into the Océ Color Control Suite: Océ Color Control - Catch The base component Océ Color Control Catch provides the basis for a multitude of tasks for color measurement, quality control, certification, statistical analysis of quality control jobs, ICC profiling, and profile optimization. Océ Color Control Catch allows customers to achieve the best quality attainable by capturing and confirming print conditions across different printers, across different papers, or even different print sites. By capturing color information of the desired target, it is easy to steer the printer to its color ready neutral state and, over time, all the color information captured provides historical color trending statistics. Optimizing and maintaining consistent and repeatable color output, within defined tolerances, is a critical process of printing, which helps communicate color accuracy and reduce waste. A unique advantage of Océ Color Control Catch for Canon production inkjet customers is its ability to automate color matching in multi-press installs. Océ Color Control Océ Color Control Suite - IMProve Software for auto intelligent optimization and refurbishing of measurement data The Océ Color Control IMProve software module enhances measurement data prior to profiling. There are many situations where measurement data is not prepared correctly and can cause issues when creating ICC profiles. These may be caused by reading errors from the measuring instrument or print errors or other artifacts (e.g. inhomogeneous data) resulting in a less than perfect measurement data quality. 3

4 OCÉ COLOR CONTROL SUITE ACHIEVING CONSISTENT COLOR Océ Color Control IMProve is the perfect tool for optimizing measurement data and intelligently averaging multiple data points. Océ Color Control IMProve is a collection of various tools offering optimization of measurement data and correction for optical brighteners to G7 measurement data correction. The quality of ICC profiles is only as good as the data. Analyzing and optimizing color data results in a better profile quality and higher consistency of output on production process. Using the Automatic button, you can easily clean up redundant color patches in the measurement file (Redundancies), correct faulty measurement values (Correction), and smooth the measurement data (Smoothing) automatically with just one click. Océ Color Control Suite DeviL Software for high-end ICC device profile creation The basic task of Océ Color Control DeviL is to create high-end ICC profiles to transform color data from one color space to another. It offers a highly customizable yet comprehensive set of tools for generating ICC profiles to use wherever needed in the workflow or at printer level. Users can dive deep into profile creation and modification to help achieve professional quality results. Océ Color Control DeviL also provides for the creation and editing of ICC device link profiles to achieve higher precision in color space transformations, otherwise only found in proprietary solutions. Océ Color Control DeviL brings together six modules for advanced profile creation: DeviceLink Profiling is a powerful tool to create target profiles meeting the ICC standard. DeviceLink Editing allows you to create your own gamut mapping generating RGB and CMYK target profiles editing, fine tuning your calculated DeviceLinks, creating gradiation or selective color corrections and more. The edited profile s color conversion can be saved as a standard ICC DeviceLink profile with high accuracy to be able to reproduce it in ICC-compatible workflows. MultiColor Profile Creation means that a printing system works with more than 4 colors. The maximum number of color channels supported by Océ Color Control DeviL is 7 primary colors. Image Conversion converts PSD, TIFF, and JPEG image files with the help of ICC device profiles and DeviceLink profiles. This function is very useful for checking the 4

5 profile quality on images, since typical application programs often do not support all types of DeviceLink (i.e. RGB to CMYK) or multicolor profiles. Profile Inspector allows you to manage, sort, analyze, compare, and adapt your profiles without having to leave the Océ Color Control DeviL working environment. Batch Overview enables all users to track created profiles and calculate profiles in parallel with preparing further profiles. Océ Color Control Suite - MatchPatch Software to optimize spot colors and media wedge analysis The Océ Color Control MatchPatch Module is for spot color and media wedge optimization. This is particularly useful for company logos or product colors that absolutely must comply with brand standards. With this tool you can optimize individual colors to an output color space, and you will be amazed by its precision. Océ Color Control MatchPatch modifies an existing printing profile so that selected target colors can be reproduced with very high accuracy. Printing profiles are usually a compromise between color gamut, drawing reproduction and color space accuracy. To create printer profiles, only a limited number of measurement fields can be evaluated. When calculating the ICC profiles all color areas are equally weighted first and interpolated between the interfaces. With Océ Color Control MatchPatch you now have an easy to use and extremely powerful solution to achieve a particularly high color space accuracy for selected locations in proofing and digital printing. 5

6 OCÉ COLOR CONTROL SUITE ACHIEVING CONSISTENT COLOR Océ Color Control Suite - spottuner Software for translating spot colors into process colors The Océ Color Control spottuner helps you to optimally transcribe your spot colors into process colors. You can determine which visual color property hue, saturation/chroma or brightness is most important for the reproduction. The internal, state-of-the-art color system of Océ Color Control spottuner corrects the often occurring hue errors on CIELAB -based ICC systems, ensuring a much better visual result. Whether your colors values are in RGB, CMYK or already in L*a*b* or L*C*h : Océ Color Control spottuner handles all color models and generates the correct printing values (CMYK or RGB). Océ Color Control spottuner allows you to enter a pantone number and see if your printer, paper, and ink profile can achieve that gamut. Color deviations, which result from the limited color gamut of the printing system, are represented by two diagrams graphically. Depending on whether the change is insignificant or clearly visible, calculated color differences are highlighted in green, yellow, or red. Screen images simulated. 6

7 Are You Ready to Get Started? Knowing the importance of color reproduction and the numerous challenges to the process, print service providers are looking to implement technology to improve and automate their production processes in relation to color. Color Management software like the Océ Color Control Suite transforms data for consistent color from one device into that of another device, through the use of ICC profiles. The benefits are evident. You ll achieve more consistency in color output, while saving time and money in reduced production setup, proofing cycles, print runs, and increased job acceptance rates. You ll also have the potential for additional business as a print provider that adheres to industry standards for color certification. Contact us to learn more about how Océ Color Control can help you meet the increasingly exact standards customers expect for reproducible color across media, print processes, and geographies. 7

8 CANON SOLUTIONS AMERICA unites the power of Océ Production Printing Systems with the strength of Canon. Look to Canon Solutions America for all your production needs: Enterprise Printing in the office and corporate print room Large Format Printing of technical documentation, signage, and display graphics Production Printing for marketing service bureaus and graphic arts Business Services for document process outsourcing Visit our Production Print Resource Center at: csa.canon.com/productionprint For more information, call or visit CSA.CANON.COM Canon is a registered trademark of Canon Inc. in the United States and elsewhere. Océ is a registered trademark of Océ-Technologies B.V. in the United States and elsewhere. All other referenced product names and marks are trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged Canon Solutions America, Inc. All rights reserved. 11/16