Printing onto unusual media
July 10, 2008
Written by Rob Griffith
After nearly ten years in colour management there aren’t many things I haven’t profiled. Printing onto cermaics, fabrics, plastics, metals can all be profiled to give better results but of course they do cause more problems than conventional media.
This week I visited a company I have been to before that seem to delight in giving me something new to profile. I have previously colour managed their fabric printing with great success and this has meant they now call me in whenever they get a new system in. This time as well as re-profiling a dye sublimation fabric printing system as part of a regular maintenance agreement I was going to tackle their new leather printing system.
Calibrating and profiling unusual media isn’t really very different to profiling more conventional media, you go through the same stages, but you just have to aware of the potential measuring errors and reduced colour gamut issues that may occur. Since both the fabric and leather printing systems were based on wide format inkjets driven by a popular RIP it wasn’t too challenging a day. With any RIP you always start with some form of linearisation and ink channel limiting, then move onto defining a total ink limit before outputting a profiling chart, building and then testing the profile.
The leather system was tackled first. I had requested to start on this system with a white leather but it hadn’t arrived so I had to work with tan leather. Obviously leather being an organic material is going to vary from cow to cow and with the tanning process so complete colour accuracy was always going to be difficult but the customer was experienced enough to realise this. I can’t go into any detail about the kit the customer was using as it is commercially sensitive.
I quickly realised that I would have to limit the inks quite harshly to stop the ink puddling on the leather, this would reduce the colour gamut but could not be avoided. After running through the linearisation and ink limiting routines on the RIP I then output multiple profiling test charts and measured them in using my EyeOne Pro. I was using multiple charts over several hides to try and take account of any differences in the colour of the leather, I have found the EyeOne Pro to be very good at measuring odd media since it can measure any thickness. All the readings were averaged and then the profile created. Looking at the profile in ColorThink I could see the colour space was quite good, just offset from the neutral because of the colour of the leather. I loaded the profile into the RIP and then output some test images, and the customer was delighted.
I then quickly did the fabric system, this is prints with dye sublimation inks onto paper and this is then heat pressed on to the cloth and the ink transfers. I am used to dealing with this process now after a few years of similar customers so I know I can get a good profile, the key is to uses a lot of black in the neutrals to get a good greyscale images since they often produce canvases for landscape photographers using this process.
The customer was very happy with the consistency of print from the very different media and their customer, a fashion house, will now be using the leather printing process to print wallets and bags, to go with the fabric bags our customer already produces for them.
For further information, or if you are interested in us profiling printers and different materials for you, please contact us.
© 2008 The Colour Collective Ltd
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Nice writing style. I look forward to reading more in the future.
[...] – bookmarked by 5 members originally found by BrianOrpheus on 2008-10-23 Printing onto unusual media http://www.colourcollective.co.uk/uk/2008/07/printing-onto-unusual-media/ – bookmarked by 5 [...]