Quality colour management: 5 Steps to increasing customer satisfaction

Meeting customers’ colour expectations requires more than simply installing a colour software package onto your print device. It begins in the design stage. While that design may come from outside sources, the final outcome reflects on your print shop. Educating your customers up front about what to expect and how to help get the colour they want is well worth investing the extra time. 

Here are 5 key steps for customers and their partners to understand in ensuring colour consistency and overall satisfaction in the end product. 

Printing Variables: Visualize the Final Product 

Accurate colour management in the print production process is incredibly complex, and while your customers don’t need to understand all of the details, it is important to help them visualize what their finished product will look like. 

The specific steps you take to help shape expectations will vary depending on your business structure and the customers you serve. Are you a local print shop with in-person contact with customers, an online print or marketing service provider shipping products to a regional, national or global market? Either way, it is essential to use the tools you have at your disposal to help customers understand what to expect in the final product, based on the inks, printer type and substrate being used. 

A few tools that may help them understand how colours may differ from what they see on the screen, depending on the printer type or paper include: 

  – Online collaboration and soft proofing programs 

 – Pantone Colour Bridge Guide swatch books to show, side-by-side, how specific Pantone colors will render when printed using CMYK technology 

 – Proof setup and preview tools within software such as Adobe InDesign® showing how different factors affect the printed piece’s color. Default settings will closely replicate basic options, but you can also customize settings to your specific paper and printer to show customers how the final product will look with your equipment 

 – Printed samples or proofs 

Regardless of the tools you use, helping customers understand that what they see on the screen will rarely be a perfect replication of the final product. The next section explains why. 

Calibration and Quality   

Monitor and printer calibration is a complex process, and you get what you pay for in terms of how closely what you see on the screen depicts the final printed product. High-end monitors will show images in millions of colours — nearly the entire Adobe® RGB colour gamut, while value-priced monitors may display only sRGB colours, about 65 per cent of the Adobe RGB gamut. 

If customers can see examples on your facility’s calibrated monitors, in a Pantone Colour Bridge Guide or actual printed samples, there is a much greater likelihood of matching expectations to the final outcome. However, it often isn’t possible to have that level of interaction. That heightens the importance of helping your customers understand that what they see on their own computer monitors might not match the final product — especially if their monitors aren’t correctly calibrated or are low quality. 

To demonstrate the differences between print and monitor, suggest holding a sheet of white paper up to a white background on their monitor — chances are they will see a difference. If the paper looks gray in comparison, the monitor’s brightness level is set too high or the ambient light is too low. If the white on the monitor has a pink or blue cast, the RGB (red/green/blue) balance is off. This exercise only demonstrates the effects of monitor and ambient light without having designed or printed anything yet, but if the paper and monitor white points are not the same, how can a printed image match what you see on the monitor? 

Most operating systems offer test images to manually calibrate monitor screens. Instruments such as a spectrophotometer or colourimeter can profile the monitor for even more precise screen calibration. 

Digital vs. Offset vs. Large Format: Understanding Device Limitations 

When it comes to colour production, not much has changed since kindergarten: more crayons equals more colours. In the printing world, this translates into differences between what can be seen in digital (display) applications and what can be achieved with various printer types, including inkjet, toner, offset and large format printers. 

Four-colour printers using a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) can leave gaps in the colour gamut, especially in tones involving orange, green or intense blues. Some devices do offer one or two extra colours to enhance the colour gamut or as special effects, depending on the manufacturer. 

With offset printing, if a customer needs a very specific colour that doesn’t render well in CMYK — for example, the bright orange found in logos for The Home Depot or U-Haul® — an additional ink can be added by purchasing a Pantone ink or mixing inks to achieve a Pantone specification. The downside to offset, however, is the intense set-up procedure, which is often cost-prohibitive in today’s environment of short-run print jobs. 

Inkjet wide format printers, like toner devices, may have the capability to add orange and green as manufacturer enhancements, providing greater depth than what CMYK-only can achieve. 

Understanding each printing process’s limitations and potential can help set customers’ colour expectations based on the device type and their budget for the job. 

Fifth Station Printing: Expanding Colour Possibilities 

As mentioned above, some CMYK toner printers offer the ability to enhance colour or add special effects to printed materials with “fifth station” printing. For example, Ricoh’s 5th Colour Station provides print businesses with many options to differentiate printed materials beyond the typical CMYK colour production. 

Here are a few ways you can recommend fifth station printing options to enhance your customers’ print products: 

 – Gold and silver metallic options for a foil stamping look for items such as yearbooks, diplomas or invitations 

 – Neon yellow and neon pink for extra pop 

 – White printed on clear substrate to create products such as window clings 

 – UV red (visible only under ultraviolet light) for security measures to discourage reproduction of items such as concert tickets 

 – Clear to add spot gloss for emphasis and a look similar to embossing 

Other options may vary by the device manufacturer, including additional orange and green inks as a gamut enhancement to increase the CMYK production color range. 

Source File Settings: Creating a Cheat Sheet for Your Customers 

No matter what type of printer a job is printed on, if the source file isn’t created, tagged and saved with the right colour settings, your customer may be disappointed with the end result. 

The most important step in communicating color accurately is to tag the file in order to define the desired colours. 

You can take two different approaches to providing the essential information your customers need: 

 – Create a written guide to the correct colour settings 

 – Create a default setting file for your customer in your design software so the designer can easily provide files that sync to your colour settings 

When your customers tag their print files according to your specified printer and paper settings, the resulting colours will be far more likely to match their expectations. 

When your customers understand what to expect — and how to provide you with the most accurate source files possible — you can better meet those expectations, earning repeat business and creating a strong relationship as a valued partner. Staying one step ahead of customer expectations is a two-step process: assessing precisely what you can provide and then being a leader in showcasing the possibilities for your customers. 

The success of your business not only depends on increasing customer satisfaction, but also on applying printing technology that is designed to help you build a reputation for creativity, quality and reliability – while helping you achieve your productivity and profit goals. The RICOH Pro C7210XM Graphic Arts Edition and the new edition with MICR deliver on all, with unmatched versatility to help you meet the demands of your important customers. Contact us or learn more here.