Prepress
Mellow Colour give Print Buyers control in ISO standards Introducing PrintSpec for Print Buyers
Wednesday 14. May 2008 - At DRUPA 2008 in Dusseldorf Germany, Mellow Colour Ltd will release a Free of Charge version of the popular PrintSpec ISO 12647 colour verification software.
FlashPrintSpec allows Print Buyers, Publishers and Printers to generate comprehensive ISO 12647 pass/fail reports generated from the small PrintSpec strip placed along with production CMYK printed work.
Printers requiring a system for straightforward ISO verification will need PrintSpec software plus a spectrophotometer for measuring the PrintSpec strip printed along with the job.
Print Buyers that want to adopt a simple remote colour verification system can ask their printers to email them the small xml print measurement files which they can read into their free PrintSpec software to generate comprehensive colour appearance reports to check that the job is being printed to standard.
“The benefits of a simple pre requisite such as this could be huge for Print Buyers. It will reduce proof cycle times & result in a more efficient approval process. It also gives Buyers a simple way to recognise & monitor a suppliers consistency. To meet with these standards a supplier is demonstrating technical commitment & acceptance, which is becoming more and more important as the industry moves towards standardisation.” Stated Alan Dresch, Director of Mellow Colour.
Dresch went on to say, “FlashPrintSpec colour quality control and production analysis is not just about the Print Buyer defining satisfactory performance to their suppliers. Mellow Colour is focused on the facilitation of communication. By using a target such as ISO 12647, we are giving the Buyer & their suppliers an independent and synchronised objective that will help them work together and understand quality issues.”
PrintSpec Reports include ISO12647 pass/fail information about the CMYK inks, the overprinted colours, the Dot Gain (TVI) and Grey balance. A configurable percentage of ISO Excellence scoring system is built in.
The targets and tolerances of ISO 12647-2, 3, 4, SWOP and GRACol are selectable from pull down menus, and custom in house standards can be generated for special applications.
For printing companies requiring powerful colour quality control tools PrintSpec Colour QA Manager and PrintSpec Colour Consultant have new features added for launch at DRUPA 2008.
These include:
Calibration Manager for tuning the CMYK printing process prior to submission of print samples for FOGRA certification.
Curve Tuner for fine tuning of TVI curves printed from non-linear plates and Neutralise for generating TVI curves that produce neutral three colour greys calculated from the standard PrintSpec strip.
Averaging of multiple reports, historic analysis and trending tools have also been enhanced for the DRUPA version of RetroSpec.
FlashPrintSpec is available free of charge in two versions for ISO 12647 verification – both packages run on Macintosh and PC.