G7+ Is A Must for Wide-format Printers

In today’s world of multi-element campaigns that span print, digital, and yes, wide-format, mediums, color management and the ability to hit the right color every time across every element has only become more critical. While wide-format printers may not have needed to worry as much about color in the past, when they only had a single element to be concerned with, today’s print landscape has shifted that sense dramatically.

I recently sat down with Jordan Gorski, vice president of Global Standards and Certifications at PRINTING United Alliance — and former executive director of Idealliance — to chat about color management, G7+, and the iLearning+ platform, and how these tools can help wide-format printers excel.

The G7 Movement has Expanded

Jordan Gorski, vice president of Global Standards and Certifications, PRINTING United Alliance

First and foremost, Gorski stressed that the original G7 specification is still alive and well, and is being used in many operations around the world. That said, G7+ is a “refresh, to have a calibration methodology that’s print agnostic,” he says. The original specification was designed purely for offset printing, and while it has been adapted to work with many other technologies over the years, it was never a perfect fit. The update looks to fix that.

“It's an updated take on really great balance and tonality, improving that to then calibrate printing devices, whether it's wide-format, inkjet, flexible packaging, flexo, toner devices, offset, commercial, gravure — you name it,” Gorski notes.

This recent step is critical because, while in the past wide-format often existed in a kind of vacuum when it came to printed elements, today it is usually part of a broader campaign that spans more than one technology. And, critically, convergence has meant that printed elements that were once produced by multiple operations in multiple locations is more frequently printed by a single company running everything under a single roof. Wide-format printers who want to continue to grow and be profitable have embraced other types of print technologies, even as shops from other segments, such as commercial and packaging, have started to offer wide-format.

G7+ enables printers to more finely control color across platforms and devices with a much greater degree of accuracy, even as the number of technologies and substrates used in production expand and grow.

Learning Effective Color Management

In addition to the live, instructor-led courses on PRINTING United Alliance’s iLearning+ around color management and G7+, Gorski notes the Alliance has now launched an on-demand course as well, allowing more people to access the content when and how they need it. For wide-format printers with job schedules that can often be feast or famine, this means having the ability to get color management training is no longer a hardship.

“There’s a little bit more flexibility there,” Gorski says. “It gives them the ability to access that content on their own terms, so they don’t have to wait for an instructor, or one of our events. There’s even more opportunities for training now — whether they want to attend an in-person event like we have coming up at PRINTING United Expo, [Oct. 22-24], or they do one of the live, instructor-led courses, or now the on-demand version of that training and certification.”

That certification includes both site certifications as well as individual certifications. Gorski notes that there are currently close to 400 G7+ experts around the world, and that number is growing steadily, leading the charge as more and more print operations look to make that shift. These are individuals who have taken the certification courses and have proven their proficiency and expertise using the G7/G7+ standard to hit the color targets accurately.

On the site certification side, facilities are evaluated by a third-party print laboratory based at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), which determines if the submitted capabilities and prints demonstrate a true understanding and expertise of the standard. Many locations have both — an individual gets certified as the in-house color expert, and then puts that knowledge to work getting the site calibrated and hitting the targets to get certified on the company level as well.

Another avenue many shops take is having a third-party consultant come in and work with them to get the operation calibrated and certified, and then periodically come back in to ensure those standards are being maintained.

For many wide-format printers, certification might not seem necessary — yet. But as consolidation and convergence continue to reshape the industry, it will only become more critical to have someone on hand who understands how to hit the right targets, no matter what the output will be. And, certification is a great way to prove to customers — both those you already have, and those you are trying to win — that you are serious about winning all of their business, not just the small slice of the wide-format pie.

In the end, color management can be a challenge for any print operation, and it has only become more difficult as new technologies enter the field, with new ink formulations and substrate options to utilize. In most cases, the end user doesn’t care how color was achieved, they just want to ensure their color looks the same across the entirety of their printed body of work, and wide-format applications no longer stand apart from that. While G7 gave printers some tools to achieve their color goals, G7+ expands the toolbox and helps printers get better color faster (and more accurately) across all platforms and consumables, every single time.