IDEAlliance Certifies Color Professionals as GRACoL Experts

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- The International Digital Enterprise Alliance (IDEAlliance) today announced that leading color management and on-press consultants have been certified as GRACoL Experts following a training program hosted by Rex Three Inc. in Florida.

Throughout 2004 and 2005 the GRACoL (General Requirements and Applications for Commercial Offset Lithography) committee of IDEAlliance developed an unambiguous description of how good commercial printing "appears" to the eye on a No. 1 sheet and developed new calibration and process control methods that make use of spectro-photometry and CTP to enable printers quickly and accurately replicate visual appearance on any press or proofing system.

The "G7 Calibration, Printing and Proofing" will be published in the near future. The final data from the press runs in 2004 - 2005 including a formal definition of gray balance along with target neutral print density curves for three-color gray and black will be published as the GRACoL 7 Specification later in 2006.

"The G7 methodology is not an attempt to create new standards but a way of utilizing existing ISO (International Standards Organization) Standards in a more efficient and effective way," says Don Hutcheson, chair of the GRACoL committee and president of Hutcheson Consulting. "The G7 methodology is revolutionary because it is the first specification designed to reliably and efficiently match the visual appearance of multiple devices by defining gray balance and NPDC (neutral print density curves) instead of the traditional method of measuring TVI for each color."

"The good news is that recent experimental press tests conducted by PPC indicate that G7 can be applied to any type of printing," says Steve Smiley, chair of the IDEAlliance print properties committee (PPC) and director of engineering at Vertis Inc. "G7 is not just for commercial printing but for publication printing, news printing, flexographic printing and more. This means that separations or files generated for one printing method will have a similar visual appearance if printed by another method. The G7 process has generated a great deal of excitement among print buyers because by following this methodology, we can print on virtually any type of press and on any substrate while maintaining a common visual appearance.