Case study: How Surat’s printers match textile colour to the catalogues

It has always been an issue with these print firms to match the colour of offset printed sheet with that of the textiles.

Speaking to PrintWeek India, a photographer who works for garment industry said that colour is an important parameter when it comes to sale of garment. “When there is a mismatch between printed photograph and actual garment colour, the customers tend not to buy the garments.”

As a solution to this bottleneck, a few photographers and commercial printers in Surat who cater to textile segment have adopted GMG’s proofing solutions for better reproduction of colours for textiles. this include J R Adds, Ulike, Edit Design, Dynamic, Akruti, Graphic Innovators, Adzione.

The initiative to involve Percept in solving this issue was a collective approach from printers, photographers and buyers.

Percept Printing Solutions, a colour management solution provider and sole distributor of GMG colour solutions in South Asia and Middle East has played a major role in the textile printing market in Surat in offering its colour management solutions to the industry.

The solutions offered by Percept include GMG ColorProof, ColorServer and InkOptimizer.

“A photographer just has to capture images of models with different garments and check how it will be reproduced on press using GMG ColorProof. He will do corrections until the proof matches the actual garment in terms of colour and details,” said Afsal Kottal, business director, Percept Printing Solutions.

The second challenge which many printers face is printing images on coated, natural evolution, mont blanc or raster papers. Percept has optimised the results with the use of GMG module ColorServer. GMG’s ColorServer converts incoming files with GMG device link colour algorithms to get close results to originals while outputting it in the presses on different paper types.

“We have implemented GMG ink optimisers to ensure gray balance printing, set-off elimination and quicker drying in many presses,” said Das Damodaran, technical sales manager. GMG InkOptimizer uses Gray Component Replacement (GCR) to change the separation of the image. It identifies the areas in which dots of all the four colours, CMYK are present and replaces some of the CMY dots with black reducing the ink consumption.