How G7+ Expands Color Control for Multi-Platform Printers

I recently had the pleasure of sitting 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. 

Jordan Gorski

First and foremost, he stressed that the original G7 specification is still alive and well, and is being used in print operations around the world. That said, the 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, and 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. 

And while he stresses that those using the original G7 specification shouldn’t feel pressured to make the switch, he does feel that, as increasingly more print operations embrace a wider mix of technologies, more of them are going to want to explore G7+, which will let them more finely control color across platforms and devices. 

To that end, in addition to the live, instructor-led courses on iLearning+ around color management and G7+, Gorski says an on-demand course has been launched as well. 

“There’s a little bit more flexibility there,” he 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 already, and that number is growing steadily. These are individuals who have taken the certification courses and have proven their proficiency and expertise using the 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 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 that 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 periodically come back in to ensure those standards are being maintained. 

In the end, color management is a challenge for any print operation, and it has only gotten more difficult as new technologies enter the field, with new ink formulations and substrate options to play with. The end user doesn’t care how it was achieved, they just want to ensure their color looks the same across the entirety of their printed body of work, be it postcards, signage, vehicle wraps, window clings, brochures, or packaging. And while G7 gave printers some tools to achieve that, G7+ expands that toolbox and helps printers get better color faster and more accurately across all platforms and consumables, every single time.