Learn About Color Reproduction First-Hand

If you’ve seen promotions about our upcoming Optimizing Digital Color from Your Digital Press workshop and wondered how this training would benefit you on the job, take a lesson from the Publications team here at Printing Industries of America. We recently got some firsthand experience with how color reproduction changes when a job shifts from the offset press to the digital press, and our best resource was workshop leader Dave Dezzutti.

So, how did we get there and what did we learn from the experience?

In the past, at Printing Industries Press we have always produced our color-related titles on a lithographic press because accurate color reproduction is critical when discussing the science and control of color. But over the years most of our titles have migrated to digital short-run production, and our most recent book, Color Printing Excellence, made that transition to digital printing as well.

Knowing it would be printed on the iGen4 production press, our digital production staff assured us the press would be able to handle the color reproduction to meet the needs of this topic. But we did need to do a little behind-the-scenes work to make sure we got there on a few of the more color-critical images.

Color Printing Excellence developed from the need to update Color and Its Reproduction, Third Edition, which had been printed on an offset press. That meant a lot of the images used in Excellence were picked up from the original text, and those images had been optimized for offset production. As the editor worked on the layout and proofs for review throughout the editorial process, he noticed there were inconsistencies between the images, such as the digital versions being darker than the earlier offset printing, and these were differences that went beyond the paper used.