Compensate for color drift – quickly

You are losing significant time with the calibration process of your HP Indigo presses. Users report between 20 minutes and up to an hour. At the same time, you experience regular color drift during production.

Improve machine up-time
With MeasureColor, you quickly bring your HP Indigo within calibration standards by measuring a small color bar. In under a minute, you compensate for color shifts and continue your production.

Every printing technique (flexo, offset, gravure, digital, etc.) shows technology-specific color variations throughout print runs and between print jobs. With HP Indigo presses, depending on the model, these color drifts occur regularly during the day/week. Operators perform a re-calibration process to overcome these color drifts, but this takes quite some time and influences overall productivity.

Set up using three easy steps:
1. FINGERPRINT the press
The press + substrate combination has a specific achievable color space established when building a fingerprint profile. You can do this using the profiling technology of your choice ( Esko or GMG et al. and in combination with MeasureColor). Once the color targets’ solids are defined, a complete color chart is printed and measured with your profiling software. This profile defines the color space of the HP Indigo on a specific substrate type, which we call the Fingerprinted state.

2. Establish a COLOR-MANAGED WORKFLOW
Now that HP Indigo’s color space is defined, you can set up your color-managed pre-press workflow, where the fingerprint profile and the destination profile (e.g., Fogra 39) convert the files to the correct color space. During this pre-press phase, you can use your digital proofer to simulate the outcome of HP Indigo and ensure that the file’s color management matches the expectations. When the HP Indigo prints according to its fingerprinted state, the outcome will be according to the expectation.

3. CHECK the press
At the beginning of a print job and during a print run, you check to see if the HP Indigo is still running according to its fingerprinted state. Measure the color strip (not color converted) with a scanning spectrophotometer connected to MeasureColor. When MeasureColor shows the machine color drift, optimize the press by saving the compensation LUT from MeasureColor directly on the DFE of the HP Indigo. Reprint the job applying the compensation LUT, and the HP Indigo prints again to its Fingerprinted state.

Download the guidelines

This downloadable PDF shows an example of how it works. The example explains how you compensate for color drift with MeasureColor when calibrating your HP Indigo using a linear LUT, GMG Color Server, and GMG OpenColor. This methodology also works when your HP Indigo uses EXP05 or any other lookup table and when using different color management and profiling tools.

Please contact us when you have specific HP Indigo workflows. We’re confident we can help you increase productivity.