CET Color

Our first thank you goes out to CET Color for hosting us in their booth.

They first hosted us in their booth in Las Vegas during the SGIA show last year and we were grateful that they extended the invitation for ISA this April. Don’t believe the hype about being painted into a corner (we were literally in the furthest corner from the show entrance). The booth got plenty of show traffic all three days and we appreciated having a designated space within their booth!

MeasureColor Mobile

Color measurement in the palm of your hand?

A smartphone app that makes understanding color easy?

All for as little as $59?

This was our selling point at ISA and it was more successful than we guessed it would be. You’ll want to check it out. Thanks to our friends at MeasureColor for partnering with us!

Find out more about the device and app on our website.

Color HQ – Barbieri Spectro LFP RT

We were grateful to our Color HQ colleagues for loaning us a Barbieri Spectro LFP RT. We set this high-end spectrophotometer to measure a target in demo mode. It impressed many attendees and helped initiate some great color management conversations.

The LFP is a thorough, reliable and completely automated spectrophotometer. You can purchase one and many other Barbieri tools on the Color HQ website.

GTI Lightbooth

The correct lighting is so important to color management and directly affects the way we see color. There’s no better way to drive that point home than to have a lightbooth on display.

Thanks to our friends at GTI Graphic Technology Inc., we are able to explain the importance of light visually right on the trade show floor. Visit their website to see all the different lightbooth and viewing solutions they have to offer.

ISA – Lounge & Learn

And of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t thank the ISA Sign Expo itself – which by the way set a record for attendance this year. Our CEO Jim Raffel was honored to give two presentations in the show’s Lounge & Learn booth. His talks focused on color management for flat-bed UV and dye sub. We are always happy to share color management knowledge with others in the industry during these educational sessions.

If you’d like copies of these presentations, please let us know!

We had a great show this year and we look forward to next year’s ISA in Orlando!

The post Thank You For A Great Show At ISA! appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

The Reading List

1. Use code EXMETRIX17 and get $200 off registration for the Idealliance Experience conference. Everybody likes to save money, right? We appreciate Idealliance providing us with a special code to save some dollars on registration for this conference. By the way, it’s not too late to use it. The Idealliance Experience conference begins this Wednesday, May 3, and continues through Friday, May 5, in Tucson, Ariz. Register now and use the code!
2. Why is yellow the color choice for cartoon characters? Yellow isn’t just for The Simpsons. And there are actually many reasons why yellow is used so often in cartoons.
3. The gorgeous color that has no name. Why oh why don’t we have a name for this shade of blue?
4. We recommended checking out ColorMind and many in our audience did! ColorMind is an online color palette generator. We can see it being a dream tool for graphic designers and interior decorators.

Don’t miss out on the conversation!

Want to have access to our content shares from around the industry throughout each month? The best way to do that is to like our Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter.

You can also wait for the monthly roundup and sign up for our newsletter to get the shares. (Just type in your email address in that yellow box on the right at the top of this page.)

If you see any industry news that should be on our Reading List, let us know!!

The post The Reading List: Save Money On Idealliance Experience! appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

But first you have to find us. We’ll be exhibiting in Booth 5992 thanks to our friends at CET Color. Just look for the lightbooth and we will be right there.

Take home a free lightbooth!

Speaking of the lightbooth, it’s a 13” x 19.3” model PDV-2e from our friends at GTI Graphic Technology. And get this: We are giving it away at ISA!

The first person who commits to onsite color management consulting services will take the lightbooth home with them! It’s a $600 value! **

** Note: The lightbooth needs to be picked up between 3 and 4 p.m. on Saturday (the last hour of the show) unless other arrangements are made beforehand. Shipping is not included.

Measure color on the go!

This week at ISA, we will be introducing ColorMetrix Mobile. It’s powered by a small measuring instrument from our friends at MeasureColor.mobi that you can fit in your pocket. It’s great for quick spot checks anywhere and educating folks about color difference measurements. Stop by and give it a try!

The unit itself is only $59 and we have a limited number with us at the show that you can purchase on site. There is a free app for your smartphone available or if you want to import your own colors, you can subscribe to the full version of the app. The app and instrument can also be purchased online. (Please use our link so we get credit for the sale vs. buying directly on the MeasureColor.mobi site.

We are excited for this week’s show! Please let us know if you’d like to schedule personal demonstrations of our software and services during ISA!

Lounge & Learn Sessions

Our CEO Jim Raffel will also be giving two presentations at the Lounge & Learn booth at ISA. Lounge & Learn sessions will be held in booth 332.

1. Building Custom Profiles for UV Flat-Bed Printing Made Easy – Thursday, April 20, 1:45 – 2:15 p.m.
2. Building Custom Profiles for Dye Sublimation Printing Made Easy – Friday, April 21, 10:45 – 11:15 a.m.

Check out the entire Lounge & Learn schedule.

The post This Week At ISA: We Give Away A Lightbooth & We Measure Color On The Go appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

How is the boot camp structured?

The Color Management Boot Camps are coordinated by SGIA’s Ray Weiss who is a Digital Imaging Specialist. He brings in several industry experts as instructors. The instructors range from color consultants to RIP representatives to printer specialists. (Disclosure: ColorMetrix CEO Jim Raffel is one of the instructors.)

The quarterly boot camps are three days long; typically Tuesday through Thursday. They are held at the SGIA corporate office in Fairfax, Va. Each day starts at 9 a.m. There are several breaks worked into the agenda throughout the day but lunch is provided on site to maximize everyone’s time.

The boot camps are kept to 20 attendees; so they fill up quickly. But the small size allows for more one-on-one discussions and a better overall learning environment.

What is covered during the boot camp?

While each boot camp is probably structured a little differently, the one I attended started out with a day of discussion on the basics such as color theory, color management strategies, anatomy of the inkjet printer and measurement variables.

Most of the hands-on work occurred during the second and third days. We broke out into groups based on the RIP being used back home in the shop. (Most of the attendees were from print facilities. As a consultant, I chose to join a group focused on a RIP I hadn’t yet worked with: Wasatch. The biggest group by far was the Onyx group.)

In the breakout groups, we walked through media configurations and profiling. We used spectrophotometers to verify our prints. We learned about ink limits, curves and spot colors. Lastly, we learned about different software that can be used for verification.

View an example of a Color Management Boot Camp agenda.

How to get certified as a color management professional

On the third and final day of the boot camp, all attendees will be given a certificate of completion. (Mine is pictured.) But my boot camp was the first one to also offer the SGIA Color Management Certification.

To get the certification, the attendees were given a 50-question test on the last day of the boot camp. However, they were allowed to take it back home and use their notes to answer the questions as long as the test was returned to Ray within 10 business days. (Note: Taking the test is optional but necessary if you want certification.)

Luckily, I’m an avid note taker. Each attendee was given a spiral-bound notebook with the slides of each presentation. But in my boot camp, the slides weren’t always followed exactly or in some cases even used. And here’s one of my criticisms: The content on the slide images in the notebook in many cases are too small to be read anyway. So my advice is take a lot of good notes. I’ve taken the test and many of the answers cannot be found by scanning the slides alone.

I passed the test!

Yes, I recently found out that I passed the initial test. But that doesn’t award me the SGIA Color Management Certification yet. If you pass the test, Ray emails you to let you know and includes a link to download a test print.

Now your goal is to take what you learned during the boot camp and use it in your facility. You need to take that test print and color manage it using the tools and knowledge you’ve acquired. You send that back to Ray and he will measure and verify it. If it passes, you can start using the SGIA Color Management Certification badge!

(Unlike most of my fellow attendees, I don’t work in a print facility. I am currently making arrangements with a colleague so that I can work on my print.)

What kind of investment do you have to make?

At the time of this writing, the cost to attend the Color Management Boot Camp is $599, but SGIA members will enjoy a 25 percent discount. Travel and accommodations are not included. Lunches are provide all three days of the boot camp.

Also as of the time of this writing, there is no additional cost to take the test and return the color managed print to acquire SGIA Color Management Certification.

However, if your print facility doesn’t have a spectrophotometer or certain software for calibration and verification, you will need to make some investment in those areas too. And at least one of my fellow attendees indicated that they intended to suggest a RIP change for their shop after attending the boot camp.

My biggest takeaway from the Color Management Boot Camp?

As a color management consultant, I have and will recommend the boot camp to my print industry friends because it did three things for me:

1. Allowed me to interact with people who have a common interest to provide customers and clients with great quality prints.
2. Challenged me to work with different RIPs, software, spectrophotometers and strategies to achieve that goal.
3. Most importantly: Drove home the fact that it is indeed possible to attain – and maintain – consistent, predictable, repeatable color.

I started out by saying I was fortunate to attend the SGIA Color Management Boot Camp. That’s absolutely true. If you work at a print facility and for a company that is willing to invest in you and your education so that they are ultimately investing in the quality of prints for your customers, I highly recommend attending this boot camp.

Below are dates, links and availability (as of this writing) for the rest of the boot camps in 2017:

• June 6-8, 2017. 10 slots still available.
• Aug. 23-25, 2017. 18 slots still available.
• Nov. 14-16, 2017. 20 slots still available.

The post Why you should attend Color Management Boot Camp if you work in print appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

The Reading List

1. Teen gains ability to see color again. This story was overwhelmingly our best share of the month. It has everything: color, technology and human interest. After taking a medication that took away her ability to see color, her bandmates chipped in to buy her Enchroma glasses. Watch the video for her reaction to seeing color again.
2. Do you have perfect color vision? Now we don’t sit around taking BuzzFeed quizzes all day (really we don’t!), but we couldn’t resist this one meant to test if you have perfect color vision. It looks like a lot of our audience took the test too. Take the quiz yourself to see if you have perfect color vision!
3. Is how I see color how you see color? You probably already know the answer to that question but here are four color games to prove the point.
4. How to choose the right spectrophotometer for metallic packaging. It’s certainly not all fun and games with our audience. This article from our friends at FlexoGlobal sparked quite a bit of interest!

Don’t miss out on the conversation!

Want to have access to our content shares from around the industry throughout each month? The best way to do that is to like our Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter.

You can also wait for the monthly roundup and sign up for our newsletter to get the shares. (Just type in your email address in that yellow box on the right at the top of this page.)

If you see any industry news that should be on our Reading List, let us know!!

The post The Reading List: Watch a Teen React to Seeing Color Again appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

The video addressed the basics of setting primary ink restrictions which is all done visually. On one recent assignment, we stuck with visual method and adjusted the yellow and magenta ink limits several different ways to achieve the exact red that our customer needed. Oftentimes that will be the goal of a color management project – to hit a specific group of brand colors as closely as possible with the inks available in the printer.

At other times the goal of our color management consulting will be to come as close as possible to a defined industry specification like GRACoL. In that case it helps to have a visual evaluation tool like our friends at SpotOn! provide. The pair of graphs below represent the resultant profiles of two recent inkjet color management assignments. On the right is an aqueaus ink set printed on photo paper that hit the Idealliance G7 Colorspace specification for GRACoL with flying colors. On the left is a dye sublimation ink set heat transferred onto a coated metal product most frequently used to produce high-end photographic enlargements.

At first glance these two primary and secondary gamut maps might look similar to you. But if you look closely on the right you’ll see that the Cyan ink doesn’t quiet make it into the GRACoL tolerance ellipse for the outer end of the gamut. Also the red overprint, while it passes is pulled towards the yellow, mostly because the substrate is very yellow in color.

The key is that in both cases we maximized the gamut of the given ink set, substrate and other variables outside our control. And because both of these end results passed G7 grayscale, the prints deliver on the common visual appearance promised by a combination of G7 calibration and quality ICC profile creation.

To learn more about our consulting services, which include hands-on training to learn how setting per channel ink restrictions work, please schedule a call with Jim.

The post Color management: Setting per channel ink restrictions appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

The Reading List

1. The mesmerizing candy sorter. For the OCD candy lover, this machine organizes your candy coated pieces by color. There’s a video!
2. Color-changing dominoes. Mesmerizing was our key word of the month! Our audience must have also liked watching these mesmerizing dominoes as much as we did.
3. Which wedge is best? People might think that we compete with SpotOn!, but the reality is our CEO Jim Raffel and SpotOn!’s founder Bruce Bayne are friends as well as colleagues in the world of G7. So we were happy to share this blog post about print verification and process control to our ColorMetrix community. They obviously found great value in it!
4. The watercolor illusion. The watercolor illusion takes advantage of how our brains perceive shapes and colors. People are at odds as to what colors are inside these squiggly lines. What do you think?

Don’t miss out on the conversation!

Did you like this month’s Reading List? Want to have access to our content shares from around the industry throughout each month? The best way to do that is to like our Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter.

Sure, you can wait for a monthly roundup like this one and sign up for our newsletter to get the shares. (Just type in your email address in that yellow box on the right at the top of this page.)

Also if you see any industry news that should be on our Reading List, let us know!!

The post The Reading List: Prepare To Be Mesmerized appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

But what is the Color of the Year and how does it get chosen?

Pantone: The Authority on Color

First, you have to understand something about Pantone. The company is a self-described authority on color that provides color systems and technology for the communication of color. It’s owned by X-Rite Inc., a company that manufactures and supports components of color technology.

Pantone itself does more than determine the Color of the Year. They operate the Pantone Color Institute and distribute color forecasts and fashion reports. But perhaps the product they are most famous for is the Pantone Matching System; a book that fans out and is used to standardize color. There has been a lot of technological advancement in the printing and graphic design industry, but most serious printers and designers have one of these physical Pantone color books in their office and/or print facility.

So What About the Color of the Year?

According to the Pantone website, the Color of the Year is defined as such:

A symbolic color selection; a color snapshot of what we see taking place in our global culture that serves as an expression of a mood and an attitude.

But how do they determine the Color of the Year? They hold secret meetings in Europe twice a year and bring in experts in color standards groups from several different nations. After presenting and debating for a couple of days, the attendees settle on a color that they believe best represents the zeitgeist; which is the mood, ideals, beliefs and/or tone that motivates people during a certain period in time. The color chosen becomes the Color of the Year for the upcoming year.

Each time a Color of the Year is announced, the zeitgeist connection of the color is included in the press release. For instance, the experts believed 2011 was going to be a year of high stress for people. When they announced Honeysuckle as the Color of the Year for 2011, the press release stated:

In times of stress, we need something to lift our spirits. Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues.

In the case of the 2017 Color of the Year, Pantone said this about Greenery:

A refreshing and revitalizing shade, Greenery is symbolic of new beginnings.

Why is the Color of the Year Important?

Every year, Pantone’s designated Color of the Year influences many different industry decisions around the world.

Designers everywhere strive to implement the Color of the Year into as many of their products as possible. This year, you’ll see Greenery popping up in signs, interior design, fashion design, flower arrangements, home and car color themes, and even restaurant plating designs.

If you’d like to find out more about Greenery as the 2017 Color of the Year, take a look at Pantone’s dedicated page. It even includes color pairings for Greenery.

Also if you want a little history lesson, Vogue just published an article “Pantone Through the Ages” and they walk you through each Color of the Year since 2000.

The post How Is Pantone’s Color of the Year Decided? appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

The Reading List

1. Can you imagine “The Wizard of Oz” without color? Well without this camera, The Emerald City would have been the color of mud.
2. CMYK playing cards. Every printer needs these CMYK playing cards. The suits have been swapped for the printer’s choice of ink: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. They were sold out before Christmas but you can buy a deck now!
3. Review on Vino Optics Color Blind Glasses. The review states that they can help some people but not everyone.
4. 2017 is the Year of Color! Our friends at PrintMediaCntr brought our attention to this article. “Printers and designers better GET READY for 2017 because everywhere I look I see COLOR. Something’s in the wind. Things are changing. People NEED color. They CRAVE color.” We like the way that sounds.

Don’t miss out on the conversation!

Did you like this month’s Reading List? Want to have access to our content shares from around the industry throughout each month? The best way to do that is to like our Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter.

Sure, you can wait for a monthly roundup like this one and sign up for our newsletter to get the shares. (Psstttt… Just type in your email address in that yellow box on the right at the top of this page.)

Also if you see any industry news that should be on our Reading List, please send it our way!

The post The Reading List: Imagining ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Without Color appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.

About the Webinar

This webinar is tailored specifically for print professionals and SAi Flexi users who Here are some links and definitions related to the webinar.

ColorMetrix Technologies LLC: We provide professional color management services and creates software-based solutions that provide a path to more consistent color. The company was founded out of needs identified by Jim Raffel, a certified Color Management Professional and G7 Expert by IDEAlliance.

G7®: Idealliance’s industry-leading set of specifications for achieving gray balance and is the driving force for achieving visual similarity across all print processes. The G7 method outlines an easy-to-follow recipe for implementing ISO printing standards and additional metrics.

SAi Flexi: The company provides professional software solutions from design to production for the sign making, digital printing, screen-printing and CNC machining industries. Its sign design software solutions help turn creative ideas into reality by providing world-class design and editing tools geared for production.

The official description of the webinar is below.

In this webinar you will learn how to use ColorMetrix ProofPass/G7 and SAi Flexi to build ICC profiles that conform to the Idealliance G7 specification. The advantages of G7 are many; but the single most important point is the ability to achieve a common visual appearance across printers, substrates and ink technologies.

The Webinar Details

Date: Friday, Jan. 27, 2017

Time: Noon CST

Duration: 1 hour with the final 5-10 minutes dedicated to Q&A from attendees.

Format: The webinar will be broadcast through Go To Webinar. Attendees are encouraged to sign in to the webinar at least 5 minutes early.

Registration: Open immediately. Registration is limited to 100 attendees so early signup is encouraged. Signup is quick and easy by clicking the button below.

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The post Upcoming Webinar: How to build custom G7 profiles with ProofPass and SAi Flexi appeared first on ColorMetrix Technologies.