Demystifying Colour seminar in Mumbai focuses on colour standardisation

“Colour control can be tricky,” said Satish Nayak, managing director of Bodhi Systems and a key speaker at the seminar, who claimed that he has been working for the best part of the last decade identifying symptoms and causes and working with printers and design agencies, who have been feeling off-colour.

Nayak spoke on the topic of colour standardisation and the need to have one. Colour, and in particular colour standard ISO 12647-2 isn’t new, he said, but it’ still in the preserve of the colour specialist. Standards are about process control. “It requires more than just software and measure equipment for colour,” he said.

However, the one question that arises is, doesn’t it cost a fortune to implement? “The software and equipment is expensive,” said Nayak. “But with improved colour control one can expect to get a return on their investment inside six months,” he claimed.

These benefits include reduced paper wastage, which can be halved and shortened makeready times, which may also be halved. “By cutting makeready times you can produce more work per shift, which effectively means increased capacity,” he said.

Ian Read, found of Bodoni Systems made a presentation of its PressSign software, which he says has been vastly improved tool that can be used to help hit the standard. According to Read, if you can’t measure colours, you can’t control it.

Tarun Chopra, the other key speaker on colour management, said, ““Printing has changed a lot in the last 30 years thanks to the technological advancement. Printing is no longer a form of art, it is more mechanised and has eliminated most of the human errors. The industry has advanced, now we have measurement parameters which help us reproduce the same job with minimal differences.”

Erwin Widmer, MD, UGRA (Swiss Center of Competence for Media- and Printing Technology) gave a brief on UGRA certification.

Tadahiko Sumitani, MD of Konica Minolta Business Solutions India, the main sponsor of the seminar, in his presentation gave an overview of KM products and touched upon trend in digital printing in India.

In between the presentation, both Nayak and Chopra randomly took proof prints to show what the expected results should be and compared them on a hardware calibrated monitor. The proof were printed using Epson and a Konica Minolta C6000 presses.

Interactive question and answer session and live demonstrations were the highlights of the show. 

The second Demystifying Colour seminar will be held in New Delhi on 9 November, 2012.