4 Tips for Managing Customer Color Expectations Across Platforms

By Kalie VanDewater

These days, many print buyers are looking for print service providers (PSPs) that offer a variety of products, from signage and packaging to direct mail. To meet the demand — and to boost their own revenue — many PSPs have eagerly taken on cross-industry convergence.

However, convergence comes with its own challenges, one of which is managing color accuracy across a range of print platforms. This can be especially difficult to manage when a single customer is ordering multiple printed items and expects them to look the same, despite being produced with different technology.

To help avoid customer disappointment, we’ve spoken with experts in color management to share their top four tips for managing color across print platforms while meeting customer expectations.

Set Expectations Up Front

Making sure everyone is on the same page from the start is possibly the most significant factor in whether a customer will be satisfied with a print job. To ensure expectations align with reality, clear and effective communication is essential. For Joe Marin, senior vice president, member services at PRINTING United Alliance, this often boils down to one word: match.

Marin offers this scenario as an example: “A salesperson sits down with a customer. The customer says, ‘I need to produce this [for] my brand, I need to print it on this and on this and on this. And I need the color to look exactly the same.’ Then the salesperson will say, ‘No problem, we can match that. We can do that.’ So, where it becomes dangerous is at the beginning of the conversation, up front. If you’re setting unrealistic color expectations with your customers, it’s really all downhill from there, because in the printing industry, there really isn’t an exact color match from one substrate to another that’s printed on different devices.”

While Marin cautions against using the word “match” in conversations with customers, John Reinert Nash, principal color scientist at Shutterfly, makes a suggestion for communicating what’s possible with more visual learners.

“My No. 1 thing is, as much as possible, show them a good representation of what they’re going to get,” he says. “‘What you see is what you get’ is something I talk about a lot at Shutterfly. When a customer previews a product on the screen, it should represent what they get.”

And while you might want to offer a wide range of product options to grant customers’ every print wish, there are some things your printers can’t do. When showing products on your website, for instance, Reinert Nash emphasizes the importance of not overpromising on your capabilities.

“If there are colors you cannot print, you might not want to make the customers think that you can,” he says. “Say there’s a vivid neon green that your digital press cannot print. I wouldn’t have that as a default color palette [on your website] to make the text on my card, for example. So, I work with some of the people who run the websites and say, ‘Hey, let’s make sure all the colors that we show the customer are printable and look good in print.’”

Shutterfly ensures all colors available to customers on its website are able to be printed well. | Credit: Shutterfly

Calibration Is Key

According to Marin, 90% of successful color management is making sure your printing device hits a consistent target. In essence, you should be able to print a job and be able to repeat the results.

“Devices that are constantly drifting out of that aim point, it’s not even worth putting into your print production workflow,” he says. “If you have devices that are constantly drifting, you need to find a better solution.”

However, it’s important to remember that calibration isn’t a “one and done” process; you must continually be checking your systems.

“You want to make sure, with that process control, you’re not just making those assumptions and assuming those things are good; you continue to monitor that production,” Jordan Gorski, executive director of Idealliance, says. “You might get a feeling, ‘Oh, this is a fairly stable press’ or ‘I don’t have to do too much,’ but you’re not going to know about it until it is too late.”

But how frequently do your systems need to be monitored and calibrated? Reinert Nash offers a glimpse at the system in place at Shutterfly. He explains that every color printing device is monitored closely while it is in production, as frequently as once every hour.

“For our B2 Indigo presses, I get color data once an hour from every press in the fleet,” he says. “Some of the other ones, it’s not every hour, but I certainly get [data] at least once a shift.”

Credit: Shutterfly

Invest In Color Management Systems

Another tip to help you manage your colors is to invest in tools that will help you manage them.

While there are many different options out there, a good indication that a system will help you manage your colors is if it has received G7 System Certification. This certification, which is provided through Idealliance, evaluates whether a software can calibrate a printing device up to the G7 specification. Gorski says this can be helpful for a single device or for a whole fleet across multiple facilities.

“That system certification does provide a third-party, independent evaluation of a system or tool to verify capabilities,” Gorski explains. “Idealliance and PRINTING United Alliance, along with our independent, third-party evaluation lab at RIT, verify those capabilities to meet the standards that we’ve established — that align with international standards, as well as our own work across different print methodologies, like G7.”
Additionally, Reinert Nash says putting a system in place to share color data between facilities can further bolster your color accuracy.

“The science isn’t that hard, but every print shop is set up differently. ... Everyone’s got a different wrinkle of the printers they use, the instruments they use to collect the data, and even the tools they use to share the data,” he says. “So I’m learning, as I have more and more of our partner fulfillers sharing color data with us, each one’s a little different — and that’s OK.”

Focus on Education

All of these best practices depend on one crucial element: education.

“If the folks involved across the supply chain aren’t aware of what’s required with print ... and also how to communicate that amongst each other, you’re really going to have a tough time accomplishing any of those goals or requirements,” Gorski says. “Kind of like language barriers — if people are using different methodologies, if people are using different terminologies, it’s hard to have that communication. … Education is really the first part of it.”

Secure Your G7+ Certification

To help the industry stay on top of color management as software and technologies evolve, iLEARNING+ has begun offering additional color management courses and certifications over the past year. These added courses focus on helping existing G7 experts upgrade their certification to G7+ — an expansion of the stalwart G7 specification for color calibration — as well as providing color management education in languages other than English to better serve print providers in Asia and South America, for instance.

Updates in Color Management

One of the top priorities for print service providers (PSPs) looking to manage their colors across platforms while meeting customer needs is staying up to date with the latest in color management. Here, Jordan Gorski, executive director of Idealliance, offers insights into some of the changes to the color management landscape from 2024.

Seven-Color ECG

Print Properties Committee (PPC), Idealliance’s working group aimed at setting standards to help propel the industry forward, released a new seven-color extended color gamut (ECG) profile and dataset, which includes CMYK and orange, green, and violet (OGV).

Gorski notes that the new standard is agnostic, meaning printers will be able to hit the standard regardless of the equipment and software solutions they use.

“It is a project that started in 2018, and over the years there’s been a lot of work to streamline those processes, with significant changes in those methodologies as ECG has grown,” he says. “Putting that benchmark out there now is the last piece of the project. Announcing that color profile has been an exciting milestone for the industry and [for] us as the PPC.

UV Printing on Uncoated Paper

The PPC also released a profile and dataset for printing on uncoated paper with UV curable inks.
“In the past, someone printing in that kind of application had to rely on other profiles that were created just with standard coated papers, different ink sets, stuff like that,” Gorski says. “This is really a profile devoted to them that helps them leverage the capabilities of UV ink. … Now, they’ve got something devoted to them that they can leverage but that also goes up- and downstream for designers, prepress, proofing, all that, so everybody can communicate much better now.”

A Major G7 Milestone

In January 2024, PRINTING United Alliance and Idealliance unveiled G7+, an expanded specification of the G7 for color calibration specification. Less than a year after its release, the Alliance and Idealliance celebrated a huge milestone for the G7 program: the receipt of the 20,000th G7 Master Qualification submission.

“The G7 program has been around for years, but that milestone at 20,000 submissions really emphasizes the continued demand and the leverage of G7 Master Qualification,” Gorski says, “not only by printers around the world but also by print buyers and brands who continue to seek out those leading qualified printers to ensure that their print — regardless of where, when, and how it’s produced — falls in line with G7 for that visual consistency.”

And though the G7+ specification is still a fairly recent update to color management, it continues to evolve with the support of print experts to meet industry needs.