Colour Management and Reproduction in Digital Printing

General idea on what colors are and how we see them.

Let us look at what are RGB colors, additive colors, and colors from light sources.

If you do not have a design software, Inkscape is an open source free one, you can download it and use it to experiment with colors but it is not a must, you can use what you have or just watch if you do not want to download it.

Let us look here at what are CMYK color, Subtractive colors and light reflection from surfaces.

Playing with CMYK in Inkscape.

A look at how does digital printing happens ( the ink jet not the laser printing)

Let us look with a digital microscope on the inks and why we use light inks in some printers.

What are Special inks and why we use them, and a special look at White ink as well.

Have you ever thought what is the whitest White area I can get in my print? watch!

In this lecture we will see what is the effect of the White point of the material we are printing on on the overall colors of our printout.

In this lecture we are going to look at an image, in different lighting condition and see if the colors change.

the result will surprise you!

Watch this lecture for are raster graphics?

Explanation of vector graphics, how they are generated and their quality when they are resized.

In this lecture we are going to look at combined image with Raster and vector graphics, similar to when you add text to your photos or add a logo of a company to an image (if the logo is not a picture)

This is a quick look at the most used file formats in digital printing, what is good for raster, and what is good for vector and what is good for both!

Let us see what happens when we want to print starting from a digital file.

Monitor calibration is an important first step in getting the right colors out of your monitors. it is a first step in color management workflow. watch!

Another very important step in getting the desired colors is calibrating your printer ( creating a good color profile for it ) or using a good or suitable one for your printer and printing media if you are not creating one.

We always hear the " color profile"  name when it goes to printing. let us look what are color profiles.

A quick look at the input color profiles and how do they affect color processing in our systems.

A look at output color profiles and how important they are in getting our printers to print the right colors.

This is a look at the steps to create color profiles, if you are not in a printing shop or you have a spectrophotometer, it is still good to have a look how color profiles are created, this will give you a better understanding on what is going on!

Let us look what are Raster Image Processing software (RIP).

if you work in a printing company you must have heard about them but do you know what they do exactly?

Let us watch!

A look on what are Spot Color and Named colors.

you may have been dealing with this issue but you do not know about Spot colors and Name colors.

Black and Grey colors can be generated using black color ( in CMYK) or Black inks when printed. let us have a look.

Also, Black and Grey colors can be generated by using CMYK in design and printing.

Let us look at the single color and composite Blacks and Greys when they are printed, compare, and see what is better.

Let us see a raster colorful image and see how can we get the best colors our of the print.

This is another example of a raster image but it is a Black & White and we want to get the best Black & White we can from the printer.

Here we printed both images with different color setting and let us see how will this affect the output!

This is a conclusion on what are the best practices to get the best and matched colors out of our printers in the case of raster graphics.

The same way we discussed printing raster images in previous section, we will see how can we match solid colors, those solid colors are mostly generated in vector images creation software.

What happens if what we printed was not we  exactly wanted, or it was not approved by our customer?

In this lecture we will see use the color swatches method to color match some colors that are not printed as desired.

This lecture is about the color match and the importance of  color replacement in our designs and  in our RIP software in order to get the colors we wanted.

Let us see how we match colors when the image is a combination of raster and vector images together.

Let us bring it all together and see what we learned and how can we apply it on our real life, this is a conclusion of the course.

A look back at the introduction and the issues that were presented and what solutions we have for them after what we learned in this course!

Finally, Thank You!

Your feedback will keep me going and enhancing this course.