Digital proofing wonderful technology (on)

In platemaking, colors are extremely important. Accurate and repetitive reproduction of colors is fundamental to the survival of the industry. As a basic element of graphic design engineering, graphic designers use color as a tool for communication. What they are most concerned with is how to demonstrate the design's accurate proofing to the customer; for prepress, from selecting and creating colors to maintaining color accuracy and security Truth, the entire production process requires extremely high reliability. The prepress equipment is concerned with the interaction between printed sheets. The color conversion requires the prepress professional to be able to create the limited color gamut of the color and printing. Balanced; in today's commercial printing, dedicated, highly automated printing equipment is used, it has a high degree of precision; at high speed printing, the focus is on how to maintain color consistency and critical positioning; With the advent of the Internet era, images that have traditionally been used only for printing have entered the era of electronic media. The electronic revolution has caused changes in the printing industry and has also caused changes in the pursuit of color. But in any case, color is important. It has an extraordinary value in the process of plate making. The requirements for color in the plate making and printing industry are harsh. Therefore, how to realize the unity of color beauty and harshness is the goal pursued by the industry. one.

What is color accuracy

The color generation system must be able to reproduce a color and it can be copied many times without any change. The color of printed products should be precise, consistent, and repeatable.

The color fidelity is defined as the specified or measured standard color accuracy. The standard colorants used in the printing industry are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. These colors make color printing "craft" possible. Through the use of transparent ink and a color grading system, various sizes of ink dots can be simulated, and these colors produce images that allow the human eye to see "full color."

The ability to print a color accurately and repeatedly on a medium is a measure of the repeatability of the color. People are not only concerned with the repeatability of colors printed on the same media and devices, but they also care about the repeatability and accuracy of the colors between the printers. Although one can visually inspect the results of a printing process over various periods, the human eye is generally not aware of more subtle changes that occur over time and may miss the repetitions that exist in multiple copies of an image. Sex error. However, in the routine printing industry, it is necessary to obtain the same proofing effect when repeatedly outputting the same digital file. This is the demand for color accuracy.

The pursuit of color accuracy

It can be said that the emphasis and pursuit of color accuracy is the most obvious in the plate printing industry. For a long time, in the plate-making printing industry, proofing has been highly valued by people as an important means of controlling color. Through proofing, various errors can be avoided. However, at present, people generally adopt a more traditional proofing method. In recent years, the printing service market has undergone tremendous changes. The increase in work orders on the market and the reduction in the number of prints per order require shorter printing times, which makes traditional proofing methods face more severe challenges. The lengthy proofing process, such as traditional film making and printing, is difficult to meet the increasing demand for printing in modern times. Manual operation and chemical proofing are not only time-consuming and expensive, but also the printing colors are in an unstable state. The actual printing and printing Colors often have large in and out. It can be said that traditional proofing can no longer meet people's requirements for color accuracy. How to achieve better, faster, and more convenient proofing, and how to make the color more perfect in proofing, is the long-term pursuit of the plate printing industry practitioners.

With the advancement of human society and economic development, people are using more and more of various image prints. The most important factor in image products, color, is more important to users and designers. Especially those personal image designers, magazines, various types of advertising companies and prepress companies, their color requirements are more stringent. In the process of designing and producing the image product, the proofing is taken. In people's impressions, it seems that it only refers to proofing before printing (contract proofing). Although the contract proofing plays an important role in the design and production of the entire color image product, it is not the only proofing required in the entire process. In fact, the design and production process of image products is composed of users, designers, platemaking centers, and printing plants. In the entire design and production process, there are two kinds of proofs that are indispensable, namely design proofing for the designer and proofing for the plate making center (contract proofing).

The most important part of an image product is color. Designers mainly rely on color to express their unique ideas on the final image product. Even if the designer has a good design concept, but if it can not be fully and accurately shown in the final product, then the design still can not be recognized by the user, and then even affect the customer's trust in the designer, and follow-up business For designers, they need to design proofing to help them design, not only for designers to communicate and communicate with each other, but more importantly, to present their various design ideas to the user in a true and complete manner, and to the end. The printing production provides a reference. Therefore, they completed the inspection of color and text content by designing proofs, and improved the bidding effect of design projects. Now due to price factors, designers generally use A3 format inkjet printers for general office proofing. However, due to the limitation of the performance of ordinary inkjet printers, designers can only use it to complete the inspection of the text content, and the inspection of the color printing effect cannot be achieved. This will lead to various inevitable problems such as increased design cycles, increased production costs, and lack of ideal bid effects.

Plate-making proofing is a very important procedure in the printing front-end process. It is provided by the plate-making center to the designers and users. It is a powerful means of controlling the quality of the printed matter (mainly color quality) and is used to check the quality of the plate-making film. Means, and for the user to confirm, sign (also known as the contract signing). However, due to the disadvantages of traditional proofing such as unstable quality, high cost of revision, long cycle, large investment, and unsuitability for the development of new printing technologies, the plate making industry is constantly looking for new proofing methods to replace traditional proofing.

(to be continued)