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Colour Match Process

Getting it Right – Colour Matching, Colour Communication, and Colour Consistency


Cadbury purple, McDonald’s yellow, Westpac red, Nickelodeon orange, Woolworths green… establishing a recognisable brand relies heavily upon colour association. When we reproduce brand colours it is vital that a colour consistency is maintained across all uniforms, signs, and promotional products. A big part of the printing process at 1800 For Promo is knowing how to get these colours right.

As a client, regardless of the size and reach of your own custom branded items (even if it’s just something for yourself!) having an understanding of how colour printing and matching works will allow greater control over the final appearance of those items you are spending your time and money on getting made.

Specifically, today I’d like to build awareness around why colours vary when viewed and reproduced in different ways and to give insight into how we go about communicating colours and matching the colours you need.

So say you have a digital file of your logo and it looks perfect on screen – exactly what you want. Then, you print it out on your personal printer and maybe it’s not quite as bright and the colours are a little off but that’s still ok I guess, you send it off to print as a wide format print at a professional printers and the colours are different again, maybe a slightly darker shade of red or something, you look at the file again on your phone this time instead of your computer and again it isn’t quite what it used to be. Maybe it’s better! Maybe it’s not. Why?

Colour relies on light. A colour on-screen will always appear more vibrant than a printed version of that same colour. A screen image uses the light emitted by the monitor to make a colour look the way it does – note how a colour changes in tone if you play with your monitor brightness for example. When the colour is printed however, it relies on the whiteness of the page (or material, or vinyl, or banner media, or porcelain mug…), or a white ink that is mixed into the colours, to provide that “lightness” to the colour. Additionally, printed colour also relies on light reflection – a colour printed on Matte paper will look different when printed on Gloss paper (typically more vibrant) for example, and a colour will change a little again when it has been laminated also.

So, considering that all, how is it possible to get the colour you want? How do we navigate this transformation of colour from screen to “real-life”? And also, how does your colour remain consistent when we generate products using multiple processes in-house, and when we collaborate with other suppliers to provide a mixed range of promotional products?

PMS

PMS: Pantone Matching System – in short, the PMS is a massive colour library and a variety of digital, online, and printed colour communication tools that are used internationally to manage a consistent production of colour. At 1800 For Promo we use PMS colour values provided by clients to match the exact desired colour for printing. We also use PMS colour values to talk to other businesses about the colours that we expect to be printed by them. Although the colour will still vary slightly depending on the qualities of whatever that colour has been printed on, PMS allows us all to aim to produce the best colour match possible on any surface.

Having said this, we know it is impractical for everyone to run out and buy a Pantone Colour Formula Guide (a physical book of colour swatches that we use for colour referral) before anything goes to print. The best thing to do is to pop in and chat to us in person and pick a colour from our guides, but again, this understandably isn’t always the most convenient option. Yes, it is possible to select Pantone colour values from the Pantone website, and despite what I’ve said so far this is actually a good way to get a rough idea of what you are after, but it is important to remember that if you have selected your PMS colour based upon the way it looks on your screen, there is going to be variance in how that ends up looking when printed. Even so, I’m not talking outrageous colour variation, but variation nonetheless.

Without PMS guidance we will print straight from the files you have provided. If there is a very noticeable difference however, for example, if we are printing a poster for you and the image is printing so much darker than the screen-image that details are obviously being lost, we will do our best to match the on-screen appearance of colour (albeit, as it appears on our monitors) and we will adjust the brightness and contrast to find a better fit. If you have specific preferences for brightness, contrast, colour appearance, or exposurejust let us know!

Or just give us something real!

Alternatively, instead of dealing with digital colour confusions, if you’ve had stuff made (anywhere) before with the colour appearance you want, or if you happen to have a nice piece of material, or a birthday card, or anything that you love the colour of, feel free to lend us physical items that have the colours that you’d like us to match.

 

Processes!  Colour Matching

Whether we are matching colour to generate bleed (see Bleed!? – Preserving the Appearance of Your Complex Imagery in Heat Transfer and Print), to find a PMS match, or to match an existing colour, we will always print out a series of colour swatches on the media that we’ll be printing the final print/s on.  We’ll check these swatches against the PMS guide, apparel, or other physical item to find the best match.

Out of this first swatch print we’ll pick the closest match and assess what needs to be altered – is it a little too red?  Too blue? Not dark enough? – Basic colour mixing concepts using Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and Black (the inks that our Roland printers use). In Adobe Illustrator, we alter the percentages of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black that make up that chosen colour to generate a new set of swatches that are closer to the target colour. This new set of swatches is printed, checked, and this process is repeated until we get that colour spot on.

The good news is that we only need to do this for any colour + media combination once and then we can note this down and use that colour instantly when we need it next for a similar bleed for example. This also means that if you decide to re-order a product that has involved some sort of colour-matching a year later the process will be faster and your products will look the same as last year’s.

The bad news (it’s not really bad news) is that because we are doing so many different jobs on different media every day we are still having to find new colour printing formulas regularly… but we enjoy the practice.

Next week I will change pace a bit and take a look at something other than printing. If you are still unsure, or perhaps maybe now even more unsure, about how the appearance of your digital colour or artwork will transition to printed products, or if you now have an unquenched thirst for knowledge about our printing processes, don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have – or come in and chat to our production team in our factory!