Tuesday, June 08, 2010



One of the tougher things to do with a color printer is to set it up so that it will simulate how Pantone colors will print on your stock. In the case of the EPSON 7900 (which has CMYK and an Orange and Green ink) - this is amazingly simple using Star Proof. Simply export the Pantone Color Swatches from your favorite Adobe application (I used Adobe Photoshop) then import that into the Star proof application...

It automagically converts the ACO file ( Adobe Color Swatch) into the appropriate recipe of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Orange or Green.



To tune it, print out a 6 color DCS IT8 type target and read it with X-Rite's ColorPort application and your favorite spectro device - in our case, we used the eye-one iSis reader from X-Rite.



Once that is read into the Star Proof software, several iteration later we see the delta between the what the values should be and how they are become less and less ...



and at the end of the process, we have over 1100 spot color definitions with 96% of them under 5 Δ e. This is part of the Star Proof packaging option which also offers a method to show halftone dots of spot colors....








--- think accurate duotones!



It also enables you to assign opacity to each spot color for the ultimate in rendering that spot on your paper stock.