[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:00:00] DC: This podcast conference is sponsored by Fiery, the leading provider of digital front ends and workflow solutions for the global printing industry. Discover how Fiery can help you power up your presses at fiery.com and through the links in the show notes.
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:21] DC: It takes the right skills and the right innovation to design and manage meaningful print marketing solutions. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse, where we explore all facets of print and marketing that create stellar communications and sales opportunities for business success. I’m your host, Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. Thanks for tuning in. Listen long and prosper.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:48] DC: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Fiery Podcast Conference, a four-part series crafted for print professionals eager to elevate their operations. Whether you’re looking to simplify complex tasks, optimize your print processes, or explore new growth opportunities, this Fiery Conference Series offers valuable perspectives and strategies to stay ahead in the ever-changing landscape of print technology. My co-host for the conference is Pat McGrew, Managing Director of McGrewGroup and co-host of the Print Report Series that plays on Podcasts From the Printerverse. Hello, Pat.
[0:01:24] PM: Hello, Deborah. It’s so delightful to be here with you and the team from Fiery.
[0:01:29] DC: Our second session is titled Why Isn’t My Color Automated? We are joined by two guests today. We have Kerry Moloney. She is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Fiery. With decades of experience in the graphic arts and digital print industry, Kerry is renowned for her deep expertise in color management and her leadership in launching award-winning products. Her strategic insights have been instrumental in shaping how digital print solutions are marketed in today’s dynamic landscape.
We also have Roland Campa. He is the Senior Product Line Manager at Fiery, and experienced and multi-skilled color management expert with a degree in communication technology in print. For over 16 years, he led product management for Fiery for large format, and now he oversees key color products, including color profiler suite, color guard and graphic arts pro package, continually driving innovation and professional color solutions. Welcome, Kerry and Roland.
[0:02:36] KM: Hello. Great to be here.
[0:02:38] RC: Thank you very much. Great to be here. Thank you.
[0:02:40] DC: Pat, I’m going to turn it over to you to drive the Fiery DFE conversation.
[0:02:46] PM: Color is one of my favorite topics. We often say that font is a four-letter word, and we mean it in a pejorative sense. Color is a five-letter word, but it colors everything we do. I think this idea of talking about color in the context of automation is a really important one, because so many printers are finding themselves in a situation where they don’t have color professionals with 20 and 30 years of expertise sitting in their shop anymore, and they’re relying on their vendor partners to help them through these challenges.
Kerry and Roland, I’m so delighted that we can have you here today. I think I want to start by getting your basic sense of where we are in the industry with regard to color. It’s important, but how do you craft your message as a vendor to printers who are struggling with color? Kerry, Roland, maybe both of you have a statement to make on that.
[0:03:46] KM: Sure, I can make a start. I mean, you’re right with your observation, of course, that color is extremely important. It’s one of my favorite topics as well. It is extremely important to everybody who buys color, or print, color print. That really is everything from brand colors, getting those right, through to the brightest brights, the boldest bolds, because color and brand go together. If somebody’s brand is not on point, the brand reputation is at stake as well, because nobody wants to see a color product that’s not quite on point, because that could mean a fake, it could mean a – it could just represent poor quality. Yeah, you’re right. Color is really, really important, has been for a long time and continues to be.
[0:04:31] PM: We don’t want to think about Coca-Cola tangerine, right? That’s just not really a color we want to think about, or red cross kind of red, right? That’s why color and branding go together so well. Roland, from the product perspective, how does the needs of the brand of the global brands and even regional and local brands, how does that impact how you develop the products that you bring to market?
[0:04:56] RC: Yeah. It directly influences the way we create and market our products, of course. Brand identity, like Kerry says is extremely important. It’s a major component in how customers choose their products. However, I also want to say that it’s not the only thing that really matters. We place our products in multiple markets, and while being able to reproduce brand colors as accurate as possible, very often, you hear that that’s all color management is about. As you enter more and different markets, you quickly figure out that the challenges can be very different.
Sometimes achieving the highest possible accuracy is the main goal. Sometimes boosting color, getting the most out of the color gamut, having the most possible pop and vibrant colors is rather the goal. Sometimes it’s a mixture of both. You want your process colors to be super vibrant, you want your grays and your skins to be neutral, and you will need brand colors to be as accurate as possible. Even within a single job, there can be multiple targets and that all adds to the complexity. These are things that we need to cover and solve with our products.
[0:06:09] PM: Part of the challenge, of course, as I mentioned, we’re in an aging industry, right? A lot of the people who have a lot of this color expertise, who can tell you the frequency of the color red. I have friends who can do that. I’m always impressed by it. They’re ready to retire, if they haven’t already retired. As an industry, we haven’t done a fantastic job of educating the next generation coming up, which puts the burden on people like you, who are developing products to help printers continue to maintain their color capabilities. How do you have those conversations with the printing companies that are buying Fiery products? Also, I would mention the OEM vendors that you support. How does the needs of the product fulfill the requirements of the declining labor knowledge?
[0:07:03] RC: Yeah. There are multiple points that you – and you rightfully bring them up. I mean, there is labor shortage, high turnover rates, and that all leads to a lack of color knowledge as a function of time. For instance, we hear from our customers that in some areas, and you will turn over rates of up to 50%, are not uncommon. That basically means, half of the operators working in your print shop today may have moved on within a year with someone new taking over their roots. This makes it extremely difficult to maintain the necessary levels of expertise, especially in a complex area, like color management.
In some cases, it’s not just about losing know-how. It’s also about striving to find the replacements at all leading to labor shortages. If you don’t even have enough staff to handle the demanding tasks related to color, the challenges grow in bigger. These are real-world problems that many of the print shops are currently facing. You’re right. They influence the way we have to design our products in terms of functionality and user experience, and we’re trying to find solutions for it.
[0:08:13] PM: Kerry, from a marketing perspective, I would imagine that puts a pretty big burden on your shoulders to try and figure out how to vocalize the technical requirements of meeting the color requirements of the brands, but doing it in plain English so that the people that you’re marketing to actually understand what you’re bringing them.
[0:08:33] KM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, color can be a complex topic. When we bring new features out that relate to solving sometimes quite complex topics, it starts with even, how do we name that new feature? How do we name that new technology, so that people instantly understand how it’s going to help them, right through to the deliverables that we produce to go with any new release. Videos have to be very clear and succinct, explain the problem, kind of how we solve it. Yeah, we do. That’s the job of marketing very often, to turn very technical topics into something that’s very digestible, easy to understand and easy to learn as well. Yeah, it presents a challenge, but it’s an interesting challenge.
[0:09:17] PM: I want to jump into automation here in a second, because I want to ask about whether color really can be automated, but you brought up an interesting point about building all this collateral to help tell the story of what the products can do. Do you have to tell different stories as you direct your content to different markets? Is it a different conversation in wide format than it is in general commercial print, or even textiles and directive film?
[0:09:44] KM: I think broadly, the message is the same, because it’s about achieving accurate, consistent results, or the results that you’re after. That’s often the goal of color management, regardless of the industry, whether it be textile, specialty, large format cut sheet. However, there are some specific areas of color management that do relate to the particular technology that you’re talking about.
As an example, if we’re talking about specialty production, there are features within direct to garment to do with double whites and all of those things that are really specific to that marketplace. In the main, I would say yes, but obviously, we’re extremely careful to market any specific features to a specific technology, or marketplace, because that’s really important for them to know it exists and how it works.
[0:10:34] DC: I would think that the segmentation would almost be more beneficial if it was broken out by expertise, instead of verticals. If you’re a beginner and have no idea this language is for you, because there’s no acronyms, it’s a way, as Pat always says, to crow, walk, run them to buying in on your products and services and how they can help you.
[0:10:57] KM: Yeah. I mean, I would say that’s really true for educational material. Educational material is very much broken down into, here’s where you start, this is where you go next, and this is where the experts go. I think when it comes to marketing really basic marketing material, we have to tell a very straightforward message anyway to start with and then guide people to where, to learn more. I think it depends on the deliverable. We try to make every deliverable, particularly videos very clear in terms of the advancements, or the innovation that we’ve just brought out. We spend a lot of time on that. We spend a lot of time obsessing over scripts and storytelling for that very reason.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:11:41] DC: Fiery ColorGuard is a powerful cloud-based color control solution that enables print service providers to produce consistent, accurate, and exceptional color all day every day, enabling managers and operators to save time and freeing them to concentrate on more creative and profitable tests. Fiery ColorGuard works seamlessly with press-inline measurement instruments to automatically verify, correct, and maintain color output across all your print devices, all without operator intervention.
Eliminate the need for manual color checks, warm-up jobs, and unnecessary recalibrations. Simplify and optimize your color control with Fiery ColorGuard. Visit fiery.com to get started. Links in the show notes.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:12:31] PM: It brings us to the topic, which is, can my color management be automated? I know that that title alone is going to draw a lot of people to this, because one of the reasons that we talk about color automation is that we know that it speaks to a couple of different groups in the industry. It talks to print shop owners who are looking for ways to guarantee color to their customers with diminishing labor pool to work with and less educated pool to work with. We also know that it speaks to the people actually doing the work and running the jobs, because they know they have limited amounts of time as well.
When you start to think about color management, what are the topics? What are the, I guess, the guidelines that you use to develop color automation tools and figure out which pieces of the color management can automate and where it’s still going to require some manual intervention, or some operator knowledge in order to ensure the jobs get produced the way they need to be? Roland, can you start with this?
[0:13:41] RC: Yeah, Pat. I mean, actually, if you allow me, before we get to that point, because you can’t just, let’s say, invent automation out of thin air. I would like to say that before you even as a company, like Fiery, before you even get there, you need to have a couple of prerequisites in place. That’s at least our experience. You can’t just say, I’m taking certain things and I’m automating it. What I’m getting to is, I mean, first of all, Fiery has a certain reputation in terms of color. It’s a brand that has been out there for a very long time and we are active in the toner and in the inkjet market.
Unlike some of the competitive digital front ends that only support their own brands, Fiery is absolutely designed to work with virtually any printer, offering a unified print form experience across different platforms. That’s one of the key requisites if you’re trying to establish an automation solution, because you need to be able to work with all of the printers. Then, there are good reasons why the color is known, the Fiery color is known as such. We have a dedicated team of color scientists who work closely with our product teams. We develop our own color technology, rather than licensing it, as many of our competitors. We continuously improve this technology and invest a significant portion of our revenue into innovation. These are all the base elements that you need to have before you can even consider automation, I would say.
Then, another prerequisite before you go there is our color technologies are deeply integrated into the Fiery digital front end, and that makes a huge difference. When customers rely on third-party color management solutions, they face usually a very complex workflow to characterize a specific printer media ink toner combination. PDFs for color charts often need to be exported and imported multiple times. They need to be printed using various settings sometimes with, sometimes without color management. ICC profiles must be created, manually imported and then properly applied within the DFE. In each of these steps, they introduce potential errors and they add complexity, and that’s not the case with Fiery.
Our solutions are fully integrated and that means they bi-directionally communicate throughout the system. Printer settings are read and respected, while calibrations, ICC profiles, spot color recipes are automatically generated, and with the correct settings, are they getting properly installed. The impact on the user experience of that is significant. Errors are avoided, operators can quickly return to their real focus, which certainly isn’t color management, it is the production time, producing print shops that can be sold.
The level of integration, that’s actually my point, is a game changer. Innovative color technology supports everything from achieving the most color accurate result to boosting vibrancy for maximum visual impact. If you combine that with a seamless integration into the digital front end, then it’s no wonder that customers trust and appreciate what we call Fiery color. That, before we can consider to automate these things, is a very important prerequisite before you even step into this direction.
[0:17:08] PM: Does that mean that as a user of Fiery DFEs in my shop and for every different type of machine I might have, I can automate the workflow in such a way that I’ll get reasonably, I won’t say identical, reasonably similar color across all these devices to the best of their capability? Or is that too big a statement to make? Because the thing we know about printing is that there are so many factors that impact color. The substrate impacts it. How much humidity is in the air impacts it. Whether I’m an inkjet device, or a toner device.
[0:17:45] DC: Substrate to paper? We haven’t even talked about that yet.
[0:17:49] PM: Well, that’s, yeah, the substrate to paper, whether I’m going to film, or I’m going to vinyl, right? I mean, all these things impact it. As a brand, I want some sense of similarity to the color, right? We know that that’s a topic of concern for many, the global brands, but even for regional and local brands. Is the goal of automation to try and ensure that I get as close to the brand-required color for that print environment for the substrate humidity technology as possible?
[0:18:22] RC: Yes. The goal of automation, of course, is to let the operator, and we have heard about staffing issues and challenges. We want the operator to spend his, or her time with producing print jobs. They are naturally not very interested in doing color management, and they see it as a prerequisite to get the print shot to be produced.
As you said, since we are driving a wide range of printers, from the toner world, the inkjet world, multiple brands, we are always aiming to unify the experience of what it takes to create a calibration, a profile, optimize, process colors and spot colors, manage your spot colors and get the most out of the printer. Due to the fact that all the color solutions that we develop talk to the DFE in a bidirectional manner, we were able to automate these tasks. I can give you a couple of examples. As a fresh operator, if you have the challenge that you’re standing in front of your printer and someone gives you a new media and says, “Hey, can you make that ready for production?” Because we’re going to printer job in the next few minutes. I mean, usually, that will make you sweat.
What we figured out is we can take all of the technologies that we have, and we, for instance, call this specific feature one-step color management, so you insert your media into the tray, you right-click in our Fiery command workstation solution on that tray, you go to one-step color management, it will ask you for the measurement instrument to be used. This is where the type of instrument plays a big role. If you want automation, naturally, you should be looking for a modern printer with a good inline measurement instrument. This one-step color management feature, I will select this measurement instrument and I can go off, drink a coffee, come back, and you will have a custom calibration and a custom profile for this specific combination of printer, ink, or toner, and media.
It’s automatically installed. You load your PDFs, you print your drops, and you have your color under control. That is one example where we have taken the complete complexity of what my toner ink limits be, what kind of profiling settings should I use. That’s all taken away from the operator. The operator right-clicks, chooses one setting and within one step, you have a custom calibration and profile. It can’t really be easier.
Then to add to that, because if you look at color management, that alone isn’t the entire story. Color management usually gets simplified as, yeah, let’s create a profile, and then we are done. It’s usually characterized as a one-step, or a single step, and then the story is just finished. That’s not true, because you need to couple color management with color control. Color control is anything that happens afterwards. If you just created your profile and your calibration and you print your jobs, colors will be awesome. Are they still awesome in a week from now, in four weeks from now and six months from now? When the print buyer comes back to you and wants another press run of the same drop, you can’t know that without color control.
What we just, to give you example. Rolled out is a feature. What we are going to roll out very, very shortly is a feature that we are calling Fiery automatic color control. That is powered by Fiery’s ColorGuard cloud technology. The system basically schedules a regular verification of your printer media toner ink combination against a selected industry, or custom color standard and executes that automatically at defined time. For instance, you can automate and configure warm up pages to be printed on the device in advance. Even if you’re doing this as the very first thing in the morning, we will ensure that the printer is warmed up.
The process begins with a self-calibrating technique to increase the likelihood of a successful verification. The system then prints a control wedge to verify color accuracy. If that is passed, you’re ready to run your production. If it’s failed, there is a second type of self-calibration technique, as long as it is supported by the individual printer that you’re working with, that is executed, followed up by a Fiery recalibration. All of these are corrective actions that bring the result from a failed result back into a past one.
If you do all of that with an inline measurement instrument and we have designed it for that, basically, we’re talking about a process that just happens if you set it up like this once a day, without any operator intervention. Basically, if you do that as the first thing in the morning and you come to your printer, you will have a little indicator and command workstation, like a traffic light that says, green check, I’m ready to produce. I’ve now taken the entire complexity of this process away from the operator. The operator loads the PDF, produces the job, and is ready to go. It is possible to automate all of that, if you have done all the requisites of having an integrated solution with a really solid user experience, and you can technically even consider automating these parts. Sorry, that was a long answer to your question.
[0:23:53] PM: No, it’s a great answer. You intrigued me with a couple of things, including using a cloud-based standard to compare against. Deborah, think about your time as a print buyer. If you knew that this was possible in print shops, would that be a gating factor for you to decide where to go, do you think?
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:24:15] DC: Are you looking to elevate your game, take your bottom-line customer relationships and events to the next level? Then I want to work with you. I’m Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. I engage with a vast global audience of print and marketing professionals across all stages of their careers. They are seeking topical information and resources, new ways to serve their customers and connect with them, optimize processes for their communications and operations, and they meet the products and services and partnership you offer to get to their next level.
Print Media Centr offers an array of unique opportunities that amplify your message and support your mission across the Printerverse. Let’s work together, bring the right people together, and move the industry forward together. Link in the show notes. Engage long and prosper.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:25:16] DC: I have to say, I’m on the fence about color management in general, because coming from an agency, color is subjective, and there is no mathematical equation to respond to an art director who goes, “Eh.” With that being said, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of it. The good is that if there’s something that I, and again, I’m speaking from an agency perspective, because that’s what you asked me. If there’s something that, let’s say it’s disposable print, it’s something we’re sending and we’re not really waiting for people, we don’t want it to hang around, it’s nothing expensive, it’s just a direct mail piece. Fantastic. I love this system. I can send it through. I could trust that it’s going to be as close as what I’ve specified for it to look like. I will tell you, there won’t be people coming in my office and throwing chairs at me if it’s a little off on this project. That’s amazing.
The bad part moves into where printers get into this mode, where they think sellable is the only goal. This process gets them to sellable, which is something that, to your point, okay, this is going to be great. I’m going to push print, and my customer is going to be happy. In some cases in advertising agencies, if it fits that first category where, okay, great, fantastic, sellable. We’ll take sellable all day, because to me, what I hear is fast, speed. I hear speed. I also hear a little bit of a sustainability story, because I’m not wasting resources getting to the sellable, or the thing that the printer thinks that the customer will accept as up to their standards and approve.
The ugly of it is that there are certain projects that I would lose my mind if somebody told me a computer was deciding if it was the blue that we want. I can tell you that in my experience, yes, we’ve always used when we were printing an offset and we used spot colors, or PMS colors, they would still know that our client likes a little more red in that one. You can’t actually use the breakdowns that you’re getting. That comes to having somebody, in my opinion, a craftsperson on that press, who, and most of the time it would involve a press check in you were there and working it out with them.
I get nervous when everything is thought of as it can just go through an automated color process, because I think with some jobs, first of all, it’s up to the buyers, but the buyers have to understand that there might be some jobs that they don’t just want to put through a system and they want to be able to work with their printers and have conversations and be there when it’s all working out. It ends up being that it depends upon the customer, but I wouldn’t necessarily lead with it on all of the work if I were the printer, because you might make some people nervous that no one’s going to be looking at the print.
[0:28:42] PM: Kerry, she brings up a good point that part of your marketing efforts needs to not only be to the printers, but to the brands to help them understand the opportunities. If somebody is telling them – very often, printers won’t tell anybody how they’re getting the work done, right? That’s not even part of the conversation. When they do, I know from work that I’ve done for the past couple of decades, that we very often wanted to involve the brands in understanding our technologies. I would imagine that that’s a concern for Fiery marketing as well.
[0:29:16] KM: Yeah. I would say, it’s the whole color chain that we need to communicate to. That’s print buyers, and that is print providers. Yeah, and obviously, the print buyer is often the end customer, but not always. There might be somebody in the middle. Now, I think where color automation comes in is when we’re aiming to a standard, a print standard doesn’t matter where that is in the world. When we’re aiming to a print standard, that’s where color automation is really useful.
There are a lot of print providers these days do specify that they work to a specification, or a standard, technically a specification. That means that what they provide is always going to be to a certain standard. That gives people buying the print confidence that, okay, if that’s what it looked like the first time, that’s what it’s going to look like the second time and six months down the line when I purchase it again. That can affect everything, as we say, from brand colors through to just having your general, the brand look and feel of your company represented correctly.
I think, yeah, there is always going to be the customers that likes it a certain way. Maybe they don’t understand about standardization and specifications, but where automation comes in is if everything is set up correctly, and you’re aiming a particular standard and the past tells you you are at that standard, then technically speaking, on paper, everybody’s happy, because there’s no arguing with the numbers in this situation when everybody’s agreed. However, the tolerances might be something that are interesting to the audience as well.
[0:30:52] PM: Yay, Roland. We can tell it’s his freight.
[0:30:56] RC: Yes. One perspective I would like to share here is, and I tried to mention that before, it’s very important when we talk about color that we differentiate between the color management and the color control portion. What Deb said before, I agree to it. If you have set up your calibration and your profile and maybe your default spot color setups, and then you print a drop, there’s a 100% guarantee that your agency, or your print buyer is actually happy with it. That often has something to do with how the drops are defined. That’s one real-life use case.
If you didn’t properly create your PDF, if you didn’t do it to a certain PDFX standards, for instance, if you didn’t take your objects, RGBCMIK objects, if you’re not working with spot colors, then you can’t expect perfect color. There are also scenarios where maybe all of that has been perfectly defined, and maybe there is a spot color of a certain brand in there, and there is a clear LAB goal for it, so it’s clear what it should be within a certain tolerance. There are customers that like it, like you said, a little bit more bluish, or reddish. Sometimes there’s this flavor of being subjective in the entire topic, and that is perfectly fine.
It doesn’t mean that it brings the entire system to fall. Quite the opposite. This is an adjustment that you can do in the color management area. For instance, when you set up your spot colors, you can go for an optimization. You make them as accurate as possible. Someone says, this spot color is supposed to be this and that value, we can mathematically prove that it is there. It should end the discussion. There are scenarios where someone says, “But I wanted a little bit more bluish,” and then we would go a different way. We would go through spot color variations. Maybe we would adjust the recipe a little bit, until the print buyer, or the agency is happy.
Now, this does not exclude the color controller, or write the color control part at all. Because once you have that agreement, and typically, if we’re talking a certain brand color, this discussion will happen once. Then the customer happily says, “Yeah, I like this reddish flavor.” You can still nail it down. You can save it as such. We can run verifications daily, weekly, however you want, against that specific color. You can still automate the process. You can just make sure if this customer comes back six months later on, they are getting exactly the reddish flavor of their brand color that they got six months before. One doesn’t exclude the other if you –
[0:33:41] PM: You made it better, right?
[0:33:43] RC: Right.
[0:33:44] PM: Basically, you can automate that eye, and say, okay, for this customer for this job, I need this known color to be a little bluish, a little grayish, a little whatever. By automating that, we’re taking labor and time and concern out of the process. That’s part of what you’re bringing to the table with the set of tools.
[0:34:08] RC: I fully agree with you when you say, not everything can be automated. If there is a subjective wish to change colors, can I have more pop, or can you make this brand color bluer? That can’t be automated. What can be automated is that you agree with your customer. Then you store that definition. Then you verify against it over times that you will never have this discussion again. In the end, that is one of the quality criteria that a print shop can bring to the table when you say, what they did, I liked it. I go there another time and I’m getting exactly the same color, then I feel like I’m in really good hands.
Maybe even if the price is a little bit higher than in a competitive print shop, I know that I’m not going to have any discussion about color in this print shop. I will return to this print shop and I will continue to print my jobs there. That’s the thing that can really make a difference, I would say.
[0:35:01] PM: I think that it also can have an impact on the proof and approval cycle. Because once there’s a comfort level that you’re achieving their color requirements, those proof and approval cycles get much more collapsed. You’re not going through 15 iterations trying to prove that everything’s okay. Once we’ve gone through that and we know it’s an automated environment, you’ve done your maybe second and third, by the time we get to the fourth, those approvals go faster and that speeds up the time to delivery for everybody as well.
With that as an infrastructure, could we talk a little bit about the products that actually make this miracle of color happen? I know that you’ve got several and I’d like you to lead with me with where you want to start. I don’t know whether it’s color profile, or it’s ColorGuard, where would you like to start the conversation?
[0:35:54] KM: Yeah, so I’ll probably take that one. Fiery Color Profiler Suite is what we classically call color management software. It’s the solution that gets great color. that’s the start point of color management. That involves multiple steps, but it is the solution. It’s the color management solution for Fiery. The thing that takes care of that great color once it’s achieved is Fiery ColorGuard. That’s the cloud-based solution Roland referred to earlier. That’s the thing that it does a lot of what we’ve been speaking about today in an automated way, where we set our goals, whatever they might be, and ColorGuard guards that color and tells you when something drifts and gives you the ability to bring it back in line. Really, they’re the two products.
Obviously, there is color technology inside Fiery digital from ends as well. Things like, job experts that automatically adjust and correct PDF issues, which also affect color, but the main two components are Fiery Color Profiler Suite and Fiery ColorGuard.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:36:56] PM: McGrewGroup can help you with assessments, RFP reviews, education content, and surveys, plus our consulting practice to offer guidance on your best business workflows and integrations. McGrewGroup is ready to help you grow, expand, optimize, and thrive. Drop us a note on LinkedIn or at our website, mcgrewgroup.com.
[EPISODE CONTINUED]
[0:37:21] PM: When you talk about the Color Profiler Suite, so is that something that is automatically on every Fiery DFE? If I’m a customer of yours, I automatically get it, or do I have to do something to get access to it?
[0:37:36] KM: It depends. It’s bundled with, I mean, Roland, maybe you can tell me the percentage if you know it, of solutions that Fiery Color Profiler Suite is bundled with. Sometimes it’s part of the press and the Fiery bundle. Sometimes it’s an add-on. Either way, everybody can get access to Fiery Color Profiler Suite and Fiery ColorGuard.
[0:37:55] PM: Do I access that through the command center, or is it direct, do I have to be standing in front of the DFE by the press in order to use it?
[0:38:05] KM: For Fiery Color Profiler Suite, you can run it on the Fiery digital front-end itself, or you can run it on a client workstation. There are also touch points within a Fiery command workstation that allow you to invoke certain things. Same goes for ColorGuard as well. ColorGuard, even though it has a cloud application component to it, the main interface for activating things, like verifications and so on, can be done within command workstation. That’s actually quite an important point, because it means people don’t have to step outside the regular production workspace to keep their color under control. Yeah, there is obviously a lot of touch points and a lot of integration that make those steps easier to manage and maintain.
[0:38:50] PM: If I’m buying a press that has a fiery front end, I want to be asking the vendor I’m buying from, do I have access to this, because that’s an important component?
[0:38:58] RC: Yes, correct.
[0:38:59] PM: Then Roland, can you talk a little bit about ColorGuard, because the minute somebody says cloud in the print industry these days, I watch printer’s eyes roll back in their head as they go, “Oh, my God. Somebody’s trying to sell me a cloud thing again.” I know for a long time, printers would say to us, “I’m not doing anything in the cloud. The cloud’s not trustworthy. It’s risky. It’s all sorts of things.” But over time, we’ve heard more and more printers say, “No, I really want these cloud-based solutions, because they allow me to guarantee consistency across multiple print sites.” Is ColorGuard designed to enhance that commonality and that optimization?
[0:39:40] RC: Yes. That basically consists of two components. The first component is, like you said, a cloud component, ColorGuard web, where we set up our schedule. For instance, you can set up verification schedules against industry color standards, or you can define custom targets. You have the possibility in the verification presets even to define which values are mandatory for you, others, maybe you just want to be informed, but they’re not supposed to be changing the outcome of a verification which can be passed, or failed. All of that can be set up in ColorGuard web.
Then, there is a client component that is deeply integrated into Fiery command workstation. That is basically the receiving end when we are pushing schedules from the cloud down to the client. That is a component that really executes everything. Basically, if I’m saying I want to schedule a verification every day at 8.00 in the morning, the client receives it. When we are printing a control mesh, you can use your ES 3000, or if you are lucky and you have a really nice printer with an inline measurement instrument, all of that can be automated. You come to the office and the printer already verified itself if anything was found that wasn’t okay, we will correct it automatically. You can immediately benefit from that.
As you correctly say, there are multiple reasons and benefits why we have chosen this, or designed this, I should say, as a cloud solution. First one is, I can connect to any command workstation and any printer in your company. Many of the comp, not all of course, but some of the companies that we work with have multiple sites, maybe different cities in the United States, maybe even different countries. You can have a central person who feels responsible for color, set this up in ColorGuard web, wherever that person sits, and it can push these verifications down to all of these locations very easily through the cloud.
Then, another very important point about, or reason why we have to sign it as a cloud solution is if you perform a verification manually with an operator, operators tend to do it whenever they have time, because they don’t really like the process, right? When do they have time? We talked about labor shortages. They literally have never time. They might do it today. Maybe they would another time in five weeks, maybe then three weeks afterwards. You will not get a lot of data and it will be very hard for you to learn something about the stability of your system.
Whereas, if you take a cloud solution with a scheduling system and you do your verifications once a day, or maybe once a week, that’s really up to you. It’s completely configurable. Then you will get a steady stream of information, which the user can review in the cloud. You can learn things like, my printer A is way less stable than my printer B. This might actually affect your choice of your next printers. Or you might figure out that a certain media isn’t as stable as you wish. Maybe you remove that from your portfolio. By just having a stream of data points on a regular base, it makes it really easy to A, understand which of the printer media, ink toner combinations are really stable and great for my business, which are not.
In general, you can have a very nice overview about how is each printer, or even each site doing. Maybe Atlanta is doing great, and they have very small data use and customers are happy. Then maybe you figure out in Los Angeles, the data is higher. Then you can ask some questions, right? Because why is there a difference? It gives you all that information, these insights about your company, and you can react according to these trends.
[0:43:35] PM: I guess, that brings us back to that question. Is it possible to automate color management? I think with all the infrastructure you’ve given us and with the guidance of what Fiery Color Profiler can do, and what ColorGuard can do, is the answer sort of? Because it sounds like, there’s still that need to have a smart person somewhere in the mix who actually understands color to ensure that all the basics are covered in order to get that automation set up, which is not any different than setting up an MIS system, or setting up any other system, right?
I mean, every one of these things we try to automate requires an expert somewhere in the mix to make sure you’re not making bad decisions. It sounds like, we’re getting closer and closer to being able to automate.
[0:44:26] KM: Yeah. I would say that’s a really good sum up because, as you say, you need expertise in the beginning to be sure that you are aiming at the correct standards and specifications, that the tolerances are set correctly, that everything is already in tolerance before you start. Decisions you know, like how many media profiles do we need? How often do we verify? All of these things, you need to understand your color, which is another thing that ColorGuard does. It allows you over time, because it has analytics built in, it allows you to over time, see the patterns of behavior of your color. That allows the color experts to understand the environment better and then do the set and forget bit that’s relevant for the environment.
Yeah, we’re taking away some of the things that human doesn’t need to stop, stop production, stop what they’re doing to go and do, because we can use in-line instruments for that. The answer is yes, it can be automated. Even if we see what’s happened within the last year when it comes to color management and color control automation, the direction is very strong in that direction. It does depend on the equipment that you have, obviously. That’s one of the things that I think people buying presses should take a look at. What does it have built in that allows me to streamline and automate my color, as far as it possibly can with the technology that’s out there today?
[0:45:52] PM: My biggest takeaway from this session that we’ve had together is that you need to be having a conversation with your vendor, whether you are a direct customer of Fiery, because you bought it directly, or whether there is a Fiery attached to the marking devices that you’ve purchased, you need to be having this conversation about color management to make sure that you’re getting the benefit of all the power that’s imbued in it. It doesn’t help if it’s there and you’re not using it, right? Deborah, do you have any final thoughts on it?
[0:46:23] DC: I do, actually. It is to speak to the printers who are listening to this conversation. We have certainly laid out the value propositions of this system. Now, I want to take it to the next step about the customers. First of all, incorporating this technology and not shouting from the rooftops about it is a big mistake, because you want your customers to understand that you’re investing in modern technology. That this is a expanding industry based in technology and they’re not working with some antiquated print shop, go and stop the presses. It is a great story to tell about the viability of the printing industry and the technology involved.
Then I would say that, invite your customers over and make them feel comfortable about what color management is, and define it with them. Create a brand standards for them on your presses so that you already have the buy-in from your customers that this is our blue. We have agreed on that. Then from there, you can adjust. But they will have the comfort of knowing that any file I send is already going to start at the place where we’ve all agreed that it should start from. Then help them create those files for those presses.
Now that we know that this is what we’re going to tweak these PMS colors a little, or we’re going to pump a little more black into this blue, whatever it might be, if there is a way that they can set that up for success in the file creation process, this is a great time to offer workshops, or to say, “Hey, we’ll send our pre-press person to your company to help you do that.” Then, substrate by substrate, job by job, I would suggest that unless it’s what I referred to as that throwaway print, I would not assume that everything’s going to be approved, especially if it’s a high-end job, or you have somebody like me on the other end of that phone call. Send me a proof, bring it over, invite me over for lunch at the shop, nothing expensive, and let me sign off on it and then run your two million of them, whatever it might be. That’s my takeaway, Patricia.
I love this system. I don’t blanket statements about color, because I think that that could scare some people on the buying side. If it was segmented out that there are some times where this is very important and it’s sometimes where it’s only part of what is important, and all of this leads to getting your work faster from the customer’s end. It could be less expensive if you’re not wasting proofing time and substrates and all that other stuff, although I wouldn’t get into the weeds about that. That is a value proposition. I’m going to get it faster and I’m going to get it at what I want, or as close to what we have agreed with, I think that that is an unbeatable value proposition. Pat, wrap it up.
[0:49:47] PM: Well, I want to thank Kerry and Roland for walking us through the power behind Fiery. What we’re hearing in this conference is that Fiery brings so many different tools, that it would be understandable if you didn’t know them all. Our hope is that you will take away from this the power that Fiery brings to the table. Kerry, thanks so much for bringing your expertise to the table. Roland, thank you so much for bringing your expertise to the table. We hope that everyone will stay tuned for the next session and learn even more.
[0:50:21] DC: Excellent. The links to everything you need to connect with Kerry, Roland, and everything we’ve spoken about during this podcast are in the show notes. Until next time, everybody. Print long, color manage long, and prosper.
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[0:50:35] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com. We’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcast. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.
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