Multiple Measurements From One Sample

Greetings everyone and welcome to Blog 2 in our series on ChromaLT.  As a reminder, ChromaLT is the ultimate companion software for your handheld pressroom spectrophotometer and by far the easiest color quality solution for packaging printers to deploy in their pressroom.  Throughout this blog series, we’ll be highlighting specific pressroom use cases and illustrate how ChromaLT can increase the efficiencies of your press operators and ultimately lead to better color matches and a higher quality level across jobs.

Blog 2 – Multiple Measurements From One Sample?

Have you ever printed a job with a spot color that covers a large area (or even all the way across the web) and wondered about the color consistency throughout the area?  What if I told you that our ChromaLT color quality solution has a feature that is designed specifically to show your press operators the color accuracy of specific locations and can even show an average result across all locations?  Let’s take a closer look….

ChromaLT allows the user to measure colors in any order and it will automatically find and compare the measurement to the closest color standard in the job.  In addition, for any given printed sample you remove from the press, you can also take multiple measurements of the same spot color but from slightly different locations or from vastly different locations depending on your needs.

• Measurements from slightly different locations
  This is a great feature to use if your printing on a substrate that may be introducing some variation to the printed spot color.  Consider the case where you’re printing on recycled cardboard and the subtle variations within the stock are visible within the area where you’re printing your spot color.  This is an excellent time to take several measurements of that spot color from slightly different locations and let ChromaLT report on the average of those measurements compared to the color standard.  This makes a good standard operating procedure to ensure the accuracy of your color measurements and any required color corrections.
• Measurements from vastly different locations
  Another great reason to take multiple measurements of your spot colors is to see how they are printing in different locations across the web. In narrow web applications, ChromaLT would allow you take a measurement on the gear side of the web and the operator side of the web and the software would immediately show the deltaE, density, and recommended color changes for each one relative to the color standard.  This just makes sense since you have controls on each side of the press which affect the color output.  In wide web situations you may even want to check color accuracy in several locations across the web or measure your spot colors from every lane in the repeat.

So I am going to conclude Blog 2 here.  Hopefully, you found this information helpful and if these scenarios sound familiar or you think they apply to your pressroom, please feel free to contact us to learn more about ChromaLT, request your free trial of ChromaLT, or to learn more about any of our other pressroom color quality solutions.  Thanks and stay tuned for our next blog in this series.