Impressions - February 2015 - 60

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Digital Decorating

Sublimation Color Management
Learn how to establish reliability and consistency
when viewing and printing an image or design.
By Jimmy Lamb, Contributing Writer

Figure 1. Computer monitors emit
color as red, green and blue light.
However, cyan, magenta and yellow
pigments serve as ﬁlters, subtracting
varying degrees of red, green and blue
from white light to produce a selective
gamut of spectral colors. This ﬁgure
shows just how distinctly different the
color spaces are.

f you have ever printed an image
from a computer, then you know that
what comes out of the printer rarely
matches what's displayed on the screen.
This can be one of the most frustrating aspects of digital printing - the
problem is not limited to sublimation -
and is something that must be addressed
to ensure the highest level of quality in
print production.
Color management is a process that
helps maintain color between devices, such
as monitors and printers, as an image moves
between them. The goal is to establish reliability, predictability and consistency when
viewing or printing an image or design as a
whole. The overall difﬁculty of this is due
to the use of different technologies, models
and components to produce color, as well
as the fact that color itself is highly subjective in nature.
To understand what color management
is, you must ﬁrst understand how it is produced by the different components of the
production process, namely the computer
monitor and printer inks.
Computer monitors emit color as red,
60

Impressions | February 2015

green and blue (RGB) light. Although merging RGB light can produce all colors of the
visible spectrum, monitors are capable of
displaying only a limited gamut (i.e. range)
of that same spectrum.
Whereas monitors emit light, inked
paper absorbs or reﬂects speciﬁc wavelengths. Cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY)
pigments serve as ﬁlters, subtracting varying degrees of red, green and blue from
white light to produce a selective gamut
of spectral colors.
Figure 1 shows just how distinctly different the color spaces are. This also helps
to explain the difﬁculty in accurately converting from one color space to another,
as monitors are RGB and printer inks are
CMY (and K, or black). Thus, every image
displayed on your computer monitor has
to go through a conversion process before
it reaches the printing stage.
Like monitors, printing inks also produce a color gamut that is only a subset of
the visible spectrum, although the range
is not the same for both. Consequently,
the same artwork displayed on a computer monitor may not match that which

is displayed in a printed publication. Also,
because digital printing processes use
CMYK inks, digital art (RGB) must be
converted to CMYK color for print.
Colors vary from monitor to monitor
and printer to printer. Thus, the color generated on a printed page is dependent on the
color system used and the particular printer
model, not by the colors shown on the
monitor. In addition, other factors will have
an effect on color, including transfer paper,
substrate material and substrate color.

COLOR CORRECTION
The art of adjusting color transformation so that you can produce the highestquality results on your ﬁnal product is
called color correction. There are three
basic methods of color management for
dye sublimation: International Color Consortium (ICC) proﬁles, RIP software and
custom printer drivers. The three methods
are somewhat similar, though they have
speciﬁc differences.
An ICC proﬁle is a software ﬁle that
ensures that when a speciﬁc color is selected on-screen, the designated color is
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