Match a customer's colour

Studio can tell you whether a colour in a file is your customer's colour, and can change it if it is not. Both are about the file. The colour the press lays down is the RIP's job, and Studio does not take it over.

Why it matters for your shop

• A brand colour is checked with a number. One customer's red is the same red on every job, and everybody in the shop uses the same swatch.
• ΔE says what a customer will see, and means the same on every colour.
• Palettes and recipes carry it across a run. A palette groups a customer's swatches. A recipe does up to four steps to every file in a run: take the background off, put the colours on a palette, cut every piece to a shape, size every piece.

Save the colour as a swatch

1. Press Press, then Colours to match….
2. Under Add one there are three boxes. Type a Name, such as the brewery's red. Choose the Colour with the picker, or type its hex number in the box beside it. In Whose, say whose colour it is.
3. Press Add.

To keep what you measured off a printed sample, use Record a measurement.

A swatch is a name and a number. The line under the title says Kept in the shop's account, with the time, and names who changed it. It is the same in every browser, and everybody in the shop may change it. A swatch taken away is put away, never deleted.

Enter what you measured, not what the book says. A Pantone reference is a Lab value under a standard light. The sRGB beside it in a swatch book is already an approximation of something sRGB cannot always hold. What your press puts on your vinyl is a third thing. A number taken off a printed sample is the one worth matching to.

Swatches belong to the shop, not to a material: a brand colour belongs to a customer, not to a roll.

Measure a colour

Once a swatch is written down, any colour you pick can be measured against it in ΔE 2000, the figure the trade means by ΔE. Under 1, nobody can see the difference. Past 3.5, a customer will.

Select a piece and open the Colour tab. It reads the colours out of the artwork and shows them commonest first, so you can point at one. For the colour you pick it tells you:

• the nearest swatch, in ΔE;
• whether four process inks can reach it.

Replace a colour

Press Replace this colour. There are two controls:

• How much either side of it, in ΔE. ΔE rather than a percentage because it means the same on every colour. Two is a careful eye side by side. Ten is clearly a different colour.
• Keep the shading, on by default. Each pixel keeps its own lightness and changes only its colour, so a bevel stays a bevel and an edge stays smooth. A hard edge is what a cut line is traced from, and a logo recoloured into a stair-step is a logo with a stair-stepped blade path round it. Turn it off for a logo that was flat to begin with and wants one exact value.

A replacement changes the design's file, so the cut line is traced again off it and the press is sent what was on screen. Undo puts it back.

When a colour comes back clipped, Studio says so. Pushing a shadow towards a fluorescent asks for a colour that does not exist in an eight-bit file, and it comes back on the edge of what the file can hold. Better to hear it here than across two thousand stickers.

What Studio will not do

Studio does not convert colour for the press. Your RIP does that, through the ICC profile for that stock and that ink set, and a second answer from Studio would be a second answer for somebody to reconcile at the worst moment. For a colour that has to be right, print a sample, measure it, and put the number you measured in the swatch.

Studio does not give a total ink coverage figure, either. The coverage a pixel produces depends on how much black the profile generates, and a number that can be 145% or well past 300% is not one to put in front of somebody about to commit a roll.