Images_Digital_Edition_April_2020

www.images-magazine.com APRIL 2020 images 29 TIPS & TECHNIQUES or RBG colour combinations (a ‘profiling chart’) to a printing system and use a spectrophotometer to measure the resulting L a* b* values. This gives you a translation table from which the colour management engine can see which CMYK or RGB values it needs to feed to a printer in order to obtain a specific absolute colour. This translation table, however, only applies for one system and for one printing condition. I don’t want to go into too much detail here (there is a lot of mathematics behind it), but it is a combination of different colour profiles or translation tables which the colour management software combines in order to produce the exact colour that is needed. Exotic white Have you ever thought about the fact that white ink, which is part of practically all DTG printing systems, is quite exotic in the world of digital printing? Colour management emerged from the commercial printing space where users printed on a (more or less) white substrate – paper. And therefore, there of challenges, and a clever software solution developed with textiles in mind has a lot of shortcuts and built-in optimisations that many ‘commercial’ print products do not have. And if you don’t have specific experience with colour management, one phrase applies more than ever: you don’t know what you don’t know. www.colorgate.com was no real need to print and to colour- manage more than cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Dealing properly with white ink is a science in itself. You may, for instance, need to print a white logo, which should be pretty straightforward. Another time, however, you may need to print a white photo so the printing system must be properly linearised in order to reproduce the entire tonal range with the right dynamics. When you create a white layer as an underbase under a CMYK print, there are sometimes functional requirements – for example, the amount of white ink needs to remain between certain thresholds in order to achieve optimum washfastness. In essence, a proper colour management system, usually combined with a proper raster image processor (RIP), helps you to produce accurate and consistent colour, even in adverse or challenging circumstances. Before you pick a colour management solution for your own production, I suggest you seek expert advice. Beyond the core colour management task, DTG printing presents a variety Colour management systems for textiles such as Colorgate have specific shortcuts and built-in optimisations