Color It Green

Color management plays a key role in the economic future of packaging printing businesses confronting increasingly stringent quality demands from customers and growing pressure to slash their time to market.

Absent the seamless digital integration of production resources at the prepress stage (as well as in the pressroom), however, color presettings on the press must be reset for each job in order to achieve the desired result. However, results achieved this way cannot be standardized or repeated without adding time, labor, and cost, placing the company at what can be a competitive disadvantage.

Package-printing companies aiming to stay competitive must demonstrate their ability to print high-quality products at attractive prices using standardized methods. Consistent color quality across different runs and matching approved print sheets are musts.

Shrinking time-to-market

Carded Graphics is an award-winning folding carton manufacturing and packaging company. Its 120,00-square-foot facility in Staunton, Va. provides quality folding cartons and packaging to some of the world's largest food, pharmaceutical, and beverage manufacturers and suppliers, with food packaging representing 80 percent of the company's total business. Most recently, the company installed a UV-capable HP Scitex FB700 digital printer for prototyping and short-run packaging, a new market for Carded Graphics.

"We also do some short-run package printing on the offset side—down to as few as 1,000 cartons, but it's really not our sweet spot," explains Murry Pitts, president and CEO. "We play in the market between the large-integrated packaging firms and the medium-sized packaging printer. Our whole platform is built on speed-to-market. We guarantee an estimate in 24 hours, a sample in 48, and we're off to the races."

The company claims double-digit growth in every year for the past five years as proof that its long-standing commitment to internal process control continues to bear fruit with increased profits and customer loyalty. Consistent with this operating philosophy, the company has its own designer and a full array of prepress and graphic design capabilities.

"We do everything internally except make a die," Pitts says. "We make our own corrugated boxes. We have our own prepress; we sheet our own paperboard. We have all new equipment in every department in order to control our processes and shrink our time-to-market. Customers don't give you much lead time these days. When time-to-market is everything, being able to control all your internal workings is key."

Carded Graphics uses Heidelberg's full Prinect workflow optimized for packaging to support the company's 7-color Speedmaster XL 105 hybrid UV press. The integrated system includes a Heidelberg Suprasetter 105 platesetter with Saphira PN plates, Prinect Prepress Manager workflow, Prinect Prepress Interface, Prinect Image Control color measuring system, and Prinect Inspection Control, which monitors color consistency across the sheet.

According to Pitts, the color management and trap features of the Prinect system enable the company to manage projects from proofing to production. From a prepress standpoint, the system includes ICC profiles, calibration, profiling, and quality control tools designed to produce consistent, reproducible results. The system's ability to relay color management information automatically to the XL 105 printing press is key, since it eliminates the need for a stand-alone catalog of color management data.

Carded Graphics works closely with its customers for both structural and graphic design. "We deal with very large brand owners who want to control their images and designs," Pitts says. "We might design the hard structure or the folding carton, but 95 percent of the time the brand owner will take that digital file and create artwork on top of that."

Carded Graphics verifies all customer files for integrity and printability using the Prinect prepress workflow. This includes matching all colors to the color space of the printing process using ICC profiles. The Prinect RIP then outputs the print-ready document for checking on a proofer. Overall, the company performs very little tweaking on the files it receives from customers.

"Typically we have to color-correct the files we receive to some degree, but we also provide proofing systems to correct color on screen before a contract proof is produced," Pitts says. "You don't see big corrections as a result." On the rare occasions when a brand-owner's expectations regarding color and end-use conflict with the range of colors that can be achieved realistically, the company prides itself on employing a collaborative approach to resolve conflicts before a job winds up on press.

Prepress upgrade

Everett Graphics is a G7-certified Master Packaging Printer in Oakland, Calif. Prepress Supervisor Jim DeCarlo reports that the company recently added Heidelberg's Prinect packaging workflow to support a pair of 6-color Speedmaster CD 102 hybrid UV offset presses that incorporate a Prinect Image Control scanning spectrophotometer at press-side for color measurement and control.

When the company upgraded to Prinect in late 2010 from its existing Delta workflow, it was able to take advantage of variety of enhanced prepress tools, including the Signa Station Packaging Pro impositioning and sheet assembly solution, and the G7-certified Prinect Color Toolbox, a suite of integrated color management solutions for optimizing color and imaging among proofing, plating, and press output devices. The company also continues to measure ink densities using handheld instruments.

"Our Delta system was getting old, and we were ready to introduce more automation," De Carlo says. "Everybody was pretty excited about it, and with good reason. We've definitely carved time and labor out of our prepress operation. We still have the same number of employees in the department, but the difference is that we're all working smarter and faster now."

The company still uses the Delta system to make plates from a limited number of legacy files, "But it's rare at this point," DeCarlo says. The decision to opt for the Heidelberg workflow was linked to the ability of Everett's Heidelberg presses to store and recall the color profiles on-press for repeat jobs. "All of that information used to be stored on memory cards; now it's all internal. If we have to make new plates for any reason, the profile automatically goes back out."

As for color management, Prinect has resulted in a significant improvement over the old system, DeCarlo says. "We used to use only one plate curve for the all the substrates we ran. Now, not only can we use up to three or four different plate curves depending on substrate, we've also been able to fingerprint our press and substrates to our Epson proofers. Don't get me wrong—with the addition of some third-party software, we had the semblance of a color-managed workflow and were able to match color pretty well in Delta. But Prinect has enabled us to fine-tune the process, such that we can simulate the actual substrate on our proofers and know how that sheet is going to run on press."

Unlike Carded Graphics, Everett Graphics typically uses 4-color process plus two spot colors for 75 to 80 percent of the jobs it handles. The remaining 20 to 25 percent require all spot colors and branding elements. "You need the right color images for Hexachrome to work properly because you have the green and the orange," DeCarlo says. "We have a 6-color press, so we can run six spot colors if we want to, or even make two passes through the press."

Everett Graphics typically applies color management to its customers' graphic files, which tend to be based on density and dot gain, De Carlo explains. "Then we take it, adjust the bleeds, and do whatever else we need to do to ready the file for printing and folding. We usually do a fair amount of correction. If the correction takes less than an hour, we'll fix it and then contact the customer's CSR or salesperson and explain how to improve their files. That way, we're not losing time; hopefully we're making more money, and the customer also gains an opportunity to reduce cost."

Family owned and operated for more than 30 years, Everett Graphics focuses on offset folding cartons for the food, pharmaceutical and medical, health and beauty, and technology markets. The company offers services from structural design to shipping and logistics.

The experiences of Carded Graphics and Everett Graphics demonstrate that good color proofing, when combined with defined, measurable color management will enable a packaging printer to produce predictable, trustworthy, and repeatable results ,while carving time, labor, and unnecessary cost from the production cycle. pP