Sunday Sessions

Speakers: David Hunter, Tim Quinn, Dan Gillespie

Determine Color Expectations- defining tolerances

Before you can make any decisions related to color control, you have to know what level of expectations you need to meet. This session covers the difference between “just noticeable color differences” and "Just acceptable color differences." And how to assess your companies color expectations in order to implement a color control solution that will meet your requirements.
Learn about Delta E, Snowflake (multi-axis tolerancing), and E-Factor, and see and touch samples. 

Managing Expectations.pdf

Overview of Color Control – 5 C’s of controlling color

CMP Fundamental course in 1.5 hours… Color Fundamentals – In order to understand how to control printing devices color, it is critical to have a foundation of knowledge related to the terms and practices relevant to color printer management. This session covers the execution of the 5 C’s of color control:

1 – Capture devices – need to use color measurement devices to quantify color and eliminate subjectivity.
2 – Calibration – required to make each printer/monitor/instrument consistent with itself.
3 – Characterization – required to create ICC Profiles for each print condition to define the capability of the printer.
4 – Conversion – required to convert each printer's color (spot and process) to match the given standard.
5 – Conformance – required to ensure all printers, monitors, instruments, and light booths are performing as expected to create salable color.

5Cs Intro Capture.pdf

Characterize Conversion Conformance.pdf

Monday Sessions

Speaker: David Hunter

ROI, Efficiency, and Effectiveness Mindset in a print company increases profitability, guaranteed. Color Champions Guide to Implementing Color Control in your Organization.

Designed for color champions,  this session covers the transition that printers have to make from a “break-fix” mentality to a proactive quality mindset to improve profits and ensure the longevity of their companies. How to convince your company that this process is fundamental to your companies profitability.

Becoming Your Companies Color Champion.pdf

Speaker: Larry Jones  

Brand Session – Quality trumps Price

The challenge has always been do we Stop the Presses or Keeping the Presses Running. This session will use real-world examples to show how Chromachecker helps master the tradeoff between cost of production and color quality. Today Print Buyers are looking for organizations that can demonstrate mastery of the quality control process and communicate on their jobs. Technology has advanced to the point where press checks and onsite audits should be limited by implementing best practices and communicating production color consistency.

Successful Print Managers.pdf

Speaker: David Hunter

How to eliminate dedicated press runs for keeping your G7 Curves in line

• Print – Creating and applying G7 calibrated color bars to your print process to eliminate dedicated G7 press runs

Lunch Topics, no PDFs, but some links:

Direct to Fabric tricks and procedures

Tracking Dye sublimation and other complex finishing processes

Intelligent Post-Finishing Workflows – Link to the procedure:

• How to create a workflow to ensure G7 compliance after the post-finishing process (lamination, dye sub, etc.).
• We will show you how to G7 and Characterize the process so you can process check each step to know that the result will meet expectations. You will be able to create two proofs, one to show the press operator what the job should look like before post-finishing, and one to show the customer the effect after post-finish is applied.

ECG Printing – Best Practices

• Color Separation tricks- Applying large Gamut source profiles to improve ECG print appearance.
• Extended Color Printing- what are the key benefits, and how you can do it profitability
• Extended color is not about making pretty pictures; it is about transitioning jobs requiring spot colors to ECG printing and ganging these types of jobs to make longer, more efficient press runs versus a lot of short runs with custom inks and long change overs. 
• Assessing ECG Process color prints.

Soft Proofing – and aligning user displays to match the reference

G7ing presses “on the fly” – no need for dedicated press runs

Mixing Measurement devices- When measuring spot colors, to tight tolerances, differences between instruments (∆E Stack) can get you to fail even if the print is perfect. How to fix it?

Instrument Harmonization – how to accommodate Instrument disagreement…

Speaker: Ron Ellis

Track 1 – BrandQ Process 

Introduction and hands-on exercises covering all requirements for BrandQ qualification.

BrandQ Brand Definition and Requirements

• The purpose of this audit is to help the brand manager specify the color definition for their suppliers clearly in order for the suppliers to be able to achieve the brand manager expectations.
• Definition of PQX and PRX
• Defining Tolerances for process and spot work- Visual assessment converted to numeric tolerances for production.

BrandQ PreMedia Environment Audit 1

• The purpose of this self-audit procedure is to ensure the premedia department has all required processes documented and standardized through published SOPs.
• Using ChromaChecker to track Instrument consistency and eliminate having to send instruments back to the factory once a year
• Using ChromaChecker to track Lighting to ensure it is ISO Compliant and meeting customer expectations
• Using ChromaChecker to track substrates to ensure it is not changing the color of the print

BrandQ PreMedia Specifying Print Audit 2

• Evaluation of Proof and Material to Aim

BrandQ PreMedia Specify Plates Audit 3

• Platemaking Requirements.

BrandQ Print Production Responsibilities 1

• BrandQ Certification requirements for Print Production Responsibilities.

BrandQ Print G7 Print Requirements 2

• This section of the BrandQ Print requirements covers the G7 requirements for certification.

BrandQ Print Substrate Requirement 3

• It is critical that the company understands the affect of the paper on the print process and to perform relative paper theory standard operating procedures for all print processes.

Brand Process.pdf

Tuesday Sessions

Speaker: David Hunter

Ensuring the Customer submitted PDFs are printable

Creating print ready PDFs is a learned skill that not enough customers have mastered. As a printer, what can you do to ensure the PDFs that you print are fixed and optimized to your print process. 
You can have all your printers set to an ISO Print standard, but if the file is separated to a different standard – they will not accept your printed result… how do you fix this?
Ink savings hype, how does it work, and can it benefit your process?
How can you audit your prepress workflow to see what kind of problem PDFs will make it through to press and cause havoc? We will supply a PDF that you can process and we will report the status of your workflow.

Ensure Customer Files Match Print.pdf

Speaker: David Hunter

Track 2 – Benchmarking New Print devices before you purchase

We will provide the PDFs and demonstrate the procedures for each of these processes so you can know the expected capabilities of the printer before you purchase. If you are purchasing a new digital or conventional press, what level of color variation and accuracy should you expect? Does the print align with the existing printers that we have? We have benchmarked over 40 print devices, and we stack rank them based on Gamut size (range of color), color variation, color accuracy, and resolution. You will leave this session knowing how to benchmark presses and never make a purchase of a new or used printing device without doing this exercise first.

1. Baseline the consistency of the printer 
2. Quantify the within-sheet uniformity of the printer – if this fails, there is no sense in performing any additional benchmarks until this is corrected.
3. Quantify the within 1000-page job repeatability
4. Quantify the between job reproducibility
5. Quantify the gamut size for a given substrate/speed/head pass setting – ISO Gamut volume, and Number of PMS colors within 2 ∆E
6. Quantify the Accuracy of the printing device – based on your requirements (GRACoL, or other, quantify spot color accuracy)
7. Quantify the contrast resolution of the printing device.

By quantifying all of these parameters before you purchase, you will know how to configure the press to meet your needs upon installation. You will not have to figure out the capabilities after install wasting time you could be manufacturing print and making money with the printer once it is installed.

Printer Benchmarking.pdf

Speaker: David Hunter

Learn how to implement Enterprise-wide soft proofing with the ChromaChecker Display Inspector solution

• Learn how to configure the settings on your ChromaChecker champion’s account
• See how the Client display inspector controls all your user's displays per your configuration requirements. 

Speaker: Tim Quinn and Dan Gillespe 

Spot Color Control and Libraries

• You have important customer colors that you need to “match.” Can your printer match the desired color?
• Did you know that 40% of the PMS library is not capable of being rendered on a standard ISO Coated based printing device? 
• How do you know which colors can and cannot be matched before you print a job and the customer is not happy and will not pay.