articles/Qualifications/laf-page4
by Tom Lee Published 01/04/2014
Printing of a colour test chart, image or target will only bring out objective data if you use a spectrophotometer, which may be beyond the means or inclination of many users. Despite this, you can do a visual check on the 'known' colours. These are skin tones, skies, grass and common fruit, in other words colours that we are very familiar with. It is vital to review such visual targets under the correct light which includes its strength, colour temperature and the so-called Colour Rendering Index (CRI). A CRI of at least 90 is required for best practice and this can only be achieved with filtered tungsten light (a CRI of 100%) or by the use of true graphics fluorescent tubes. The requirements are set out in the call-out box.
If you have a spectro (eg an X-Rite i1) then you need software to analyse the data. This is inbuilt to the X-Rite Profiler software which utilises the Fogra V3 target (along with others). This is a CMYK oriented target. More sophisticated targets and analysis may be obtained by using i1 Profiler to collect the data and then analyse this using BabelColor's Patch Tool.
At Professional Imagemaker we go even further and have test routines to measure paper whiteness properties, metamerism and, pertinent to this discussion, a searching HiGAM set of patches at the extreme of today's printing technologies.
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