Color matching is so much of an inexact science that it might as well be considered more of an art than anything else. Some companies have decided to abandon the whole idea and have elected to let everything they distribute come out in whatever color was convenient at the time. Unfortunately, this can quickly lead to strange situations where color prints look entirely out of focus.

Before you consign yourself to a future of monochrome prints rendered down to 256 shades of gray, take a look at these three advantages of deploying a color management system in your place of business and see if there isn’t a better way to do things.

1. Matches Screen Displays to Printed Material

Using an industry-standard color model forces onscreen displays to look the same as the eventual hard copies will. Digital displays are usually untrustworthy as far as print information goes, which is an issue for those who do all of their layout work with a drawing tablet. By investing in a color management system, every single piece of software used in the process will display material in the same fashion. Hues used by one program will look very similar to those of another, provided compatible monitors are attached to each display output.

2. Ensures That Prints Are Uniform on All Devices

Say you managed a print shop that sent documents to several different plotters and lithography machines. If each of these come from a different vendor, then there’s a good chance that they’ll produce slightly different hard copies based on the same input. Color management technology can render each hue as a dedicated point of color data, so every machine prints things out the same way. Users will especially want to take advantage of this benefit since it goes a long way toward enabling a truly automated workflow. Print managers who have to provide hard copies for multiple customers will also like it since it gives them the freedom to accept several different file formats from artists without having to worry about the printouts looking strange.

3. Leverages the Power of WYSIWYG Technology

Desktop publishing systems have relied on what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) technology since around the time the modern graphical user interface was developed. While this kind of technology helps users to design things with nothing more than a mouse and keyboard, apps that use can also be challenging to work with. Operating systems that don’t come with a standalone color profile will make these programs give feedback that’s an approximation of what printouts would look like, which is a shame because that behavior is in direct opposition to their original goal. Installing an aftermarket color management system and loading it as a plugin will force this kind of software to act much more like it was intended to.

Though it might seem like configuring management programs will just make the setup process take more time, doing so will save a great deal of work later on.

Published by: Martin De Juan