A two-part live webinar on ‘Expanded gamut printing: from 4/C process to multicolor and beyond’ took place on 19 and 20 May 2016 at the Idealliance head office in USA. The 90-minute sessions took place on successive days. Ron Ellis of Ron Ellis Consulting was the main guide with 51 American participants, seven Canadians and one participant each from South Korea, Hong Kong and India.
Ron Ellis conducted an excellent webinar speaking about the various types of expanded gamut printing orink color sets that are being used and talked about such as XCMYK, Multicolor (4 process + 3), N-Color, Pantone Hexachrome and Esko Kaleidoscope. The webinar presented an overview of existing multicolor expanded gamut technologies available from Esko, Curve 3, Alwan, Bodoni PressSign, CGS, GMG and Heidelberg. It’s clear that going forward there may be several or even too many flavours of extended gamut systems which may defeat their very purpose in terms of reducing ink inventories and ink-saving wash-ups on press.
The advantages and limitations of expanded gamut printing were discussed by the participants. Ellis described how to create extended gamut separations in Adobe Photoshop and some of the limitations of soft proofing in Photoshop. He also spoke of the new developments in multicolor or spot color standardization by the SCHMOO team (Spot Color Halftone Metric Optimization Organization) and the proposed ISO 20654 standard.
During the webinar, Ron Ellis spoke about Idealliance’s ongoing research work with XCMYK to create a standard of extended gamut profile datasets and procedures. In fact with the spate of imports of 7-color high configuration offset presses and the large number of 8 and 10-colorlabel, flexo and gravure presses in India, extended gamut printing could be of great benefit to Indian printers and converters. Ron Ellis mentioned that Idealliance is open to printers from around the world taking part in its extended gamut standardization test runs and beta programme. Pioneers such as Pragati Offset have used Hexachrome for many years and are using Esko’s Kaliedoscope fixed 7-color set for almost two years. Aniket Rane
Idealliance India member AniketRane, a print engineer and consultantwas the only
Indian who took part in the webinar. An active participant of all Idealliance India activities and seminars inIndia since 2013,he is also the firstto enrollforthe Idealliance
IndiaG7 experttraining and certification programme to be held from 20 to 23 September 2016 in Mumbai.
Formore informationonexpanded gamut printinghttp://www.idealliance.org/content/xcmyk-expanded-gamut-cmyk-beta-program ; for more details onG7 and theG7
expert/professional training and certification program, click here (hyperlinkhttp://ideallianceindia.org/event.php)
