Color Management and Improving Work Efficiency

Keeping Colors Consistent Throughout the Workflow Is Ideal

These days, the workflow of printing is digitalized and printing processes have become simpler and more efficient. Ideally, we want to be able to check the final printing quality during the prepress process. It is therefore important to ensure that colors stay the same at each stage throughout the workflow and this is why so much attention is placed on color management today.

As the same digital data is used during the course of the workflow, it is natural to assume there will be no differences in the color information at each process. However in reality, differences do arise; different devices reproduce colors differently as do the different monitors used in each process. This means that the color we see is not always the same during each process.

In Practice, Colors Do Not Match Perfectly Between Different Devices

One of the reasons for this is that input/output devices such as scanners, monitors and color printers have differing color generation methods and differing color reproduction areas for color reproduction. As a result, even though the same data is used, the color that is reproduced by the devices will vary. In other words, it is theoretically impossible to "perfectly" match colors between different devices.

Even in the case of monitors, each one has its own color reproduction characteristics (differences) and other peculiarities such as age deterioration. Due to these factors, it is difficult to get colors to display exactly the same way on multiple monitors.

Alas, in a professional workflow environment that requires stringent color management, if there is too much discrepancy in color reproduction between devices, there will be a lack of certainty of whether the end result will yield the desired color. Moreover, this problem can be compounded by differences in understanding of color from one worker to another, which can significantly hinder the result.

By using a shared color space, color management can be conducted uniformly from the initial stage of the workflow. The essential role of a color management system is to absorb both the differences of the various workplace settings (client, designer, prepress and printer) and the differences between devices, and offer an environment where the same data always looks the same during checking.