Tips & Tricks: Printopen 5.1 for Colorful Results

Making the most of the CMYK process

Many customers have very high expectations when it comes to the quality of the print products they order. Strong hues are particularly popular in the advertising industry. To let you make the most of what four-color offset printing has to offer and increase the chromatic levels of color motifs, PrintOpen 5.1 from the Prinect Profile Toolbox offers a wide range of functions. It does not matter whether you strictly adhere to DIN/ISO 12647-2 or apply your own "in-house" standard. All you need is the measurement data from a test form (e.g., IT8/7.3, ECI2002, from either your own printing process or an association like the German Printing and Media Industries Federation ( www.bvdm-online.de, information also available in English). PrintOpen 5.1 allows you to create ICC profiles that precise meet your customer's needs and yield optimum color separations.

To increase chromatic levels, proceed as follows:

4.   Open the "Profile Generation
      Setup" window and select the
      settings for "Total dot area" and
      "Maximum black" (UCR settings)
      and the length and width of the
      K (GCR settings) that you re-
      quire.
5.   Open the "Gamut Mapping" win-
      dow and increase the value for
      "Global setting of color satura-
      tion" (slide the bar to the right, for instance to +3).
6.   Now calculate and save the profile.
7.   Import the profile into your image processing software.

Here you can see a comparison of the results in a separation of an Lab image in Photoshop 7. One more tip: If you set the chromatic value for "Global setting of color saturation" to -5, you can create a profile that gives you separations in the form of four-color grayscale images.