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1F : All
About Colour Correction
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One thing you will see a lot about when
learning about sublimation transfer is colour correction. colour correction
is basically a method of controlling the way your colours look once
they have been transferred onto your substrate.
When printing images you would think that you would simply be able
to open your image on the computer and print a perfectly colour matched
image on your paper, well I'm sorry that's not the way it happens.
Without getting too technical the reason colours differ from computer
to computer or printer to printer is all to do with the way your
system is set up. If you look in a TV store window at say 10 different
TVs all displaying the same channel you will no doubt notice that
many of the screens will all look different to each other, the colours
will be either brighter or duller depending on which one you are
looking at. Well its the same for computer monitors they will all
display colours differently. Your scanner will do the same when scanning
each scanner will scan slightly different and its the same for printers
each different type of printer prints differently. Well how do you
cure this you will ask ? Well that's not so easy, obviously we have
no control over Microsoft or Sony or HP or any of the other printer
manufacturers so we have to find a work around to try and make all
these devices work as accurately as possible and to do this we need
to calibrate to a sort of common standard.
To calibrate our inks so that the
prints will accurately match what you see on the screen we take
a standard monitor and the printer we are trying to calibrate and
print 100s if not thousands of small tiny test squares of colour.
We then transfer these colours to the substrate and then measure
the colours with a spectrometer (which is a light measuring device).
The software we use knows what the expected result for each colour
square should be and if the measurement is not the same it makes
an adjustment to that particular colour square. After performing
this operation many times we then compile the results into a file
and save it. This file is called an ICC colour profile. Once we have
this data stored in a profile when our customers purchase inks from
us we find out what type of printer and system they have so that
we can provide them with the right file to produce accurate colours.
To set up the file on your system you have to point your graphics
software to use the profile when printing which is a once only job
and takes about 10 mins with the easy to follow instructions. Once
this is done every time you you print an image you should be at
least 95% accurate to what is displayed on the screen.
We cannot stress how important it is to set up a consistent colour
workflow. If you want to produce effective consistent colours time
after time you need to make sure that you follow the same steps
everytime you scan and print. This way you will be able to reproduce
jobs that match the one you did 6 months ago.
One thing to watch out for when researching sublimation is companies
offering non colour correcting inks. Do not be taken in by this,
the reason they offer these inks is that they do not have the skills
or equipment necessary to create profiles. We have spent hours with
people on the telephone who have mistakenly been taken in by these
so called miracle inks and it has cost them dearly in wasted product
time and resources. You will end up spending more time changing
sliders in your print driver for every different image you print
than you will actually producing product to sell. After all if the
likes of Epson HP or Lexmark cannot make an ink that works without
colour correction then who can ?
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