Colour Management Services

Oriel leverages cutting-edge technology, refined processes, and extensive production expertise to deliver highly effective Colour Management Services, resolving any issues of colour inconsistency across your printers.

Whether you rely on Oriel's printing services or work with print providers on a national or even global scale, we offer comprehensive Colour Management Services to ensure consistent creation, management, and production of your brand's special colours across all products and suppliers.

In essence, we provide you with a tailor-made set of tools that can be deployed at all your production sites, equipping printers with the necessary information and targets to achieve repeatable colour within tight tolerances. This cost-effective digital solution has the potential to save you significant amounts by eliminating the need for unnecessary press passes, printing of colour standards, variations in Pantone books, or reprints due to colour discrepancies.

CxF (Colour Exchange Format) represents the new ISO standard, facilitating seamless digital communication of colour data. It should be considered the preferred choice for colour management solutions. By utilising digital data, printers can formulate ink and achieve a Delta E tolerance of your choosing with the aid of their spectrophotometer. This eliminates any subjective decision-making by the printer, ensuring that you receive precisely what you expect across different printers, without any variations or surprises.

CxF (Colour Exchange Format) Explained

CxF (Colour Exchange Format) is a standard allowing seamless, worldwide, digital communication of all commercially significant aspects of colour. Using CxF data encapsulates much more than just a target colour, it includes;

Material Information – the colour and whiteness of the base material is measured and the material is named by Brand, thus ensuring all Printers use the same substrate.

Measurement Conditions – the CxF data includes ‘settings’ to be adopted by the Printer when using their spectrophotometer to measure colour (all good Printers use an X-rite handheld device, specified by big brands) These parameters includes settings such as light source (D50 for example), measurement filters (M0, M3 Polarisation etc) which means each Printer is using the same settings to measure colour. If the measuring parameters are not standardised then each Printer can read the colour slightly differently, thus introducing colour variation seen across the industry when only using targets such as density or LAB alone.

Target Colour – the target colour is measured in controlled conditions. We measure the LAB, Chroma and Hue to create a spectral target and that target has controlled deviations known at DeltaE (the distance away from the target). Oriel target under 1.5DE in most cases depending on the colour (under 2 Delta E is barely visible to the human eye). A normal production tolerance would be 2 DeltaE for litho offset printers but this can be set by the Brand owner in the CxF data.

Ink Formulation – the ink manufacturer uses the CxF data to mix the ink using the same parameters and their tolerance is usually up to 1 DeltaE on to the set material. Should the base material change then the ink will need re-formulating and new CxF data should be created.

To summarise; the material is set, the measurement parameters are set, the colour target is set with a specified tolerance, therefore achieving greater consistency over various production sites.