Charting the Evolution of Color Spaces

When we talk about color, the conversation often centers around color management— the art of getting the best color, consistently, across every possible device, on every medium in use. And while that is absolutely an important conversation to keep having as technology continues to evolve, it’s not the only color-focused topic to explore.

Point of Exploration: Color Spaces

Color spaces are the inherent boundaries defining the color that can be, or should be able to be, achieved by a specific technology, or an agreed-upon space within which acceptable color can be achieved. When a customer comes in wanting a very specific shade of blue, and they want it printed on three different substrates, all with their own white points and ink saturation levels, having a common color language to use to describe what the final result should look like is critical.

But while the wider print industry has several official color spaces, the wide-format market, specifically, has lagged a bit on that front.

To explore why that is, we first need to go back a bit and look at how color spaces came into being. Ray Weiss, vice president, eLearning, and Certifications for PRINTING United Alliance, breaks it down. “Starting with SWOP (Specifications for Web Offset Publications), the goal was to improve the quality of publication printing. Specifications, tolerances, and procedures were developed. In 2004, the GRACoL (General Requirements for Applications in Commercial Offset Lithography) project answered a call by the Ghent PDF Work Group, as brands needed a universal or global appearance standard for commercial offset printing. The color spaces created were designed for these print processes and worked well for several years. As digital printing began to take hold and print devices could print even larger color spaces than before, however, there was a call to create larger color spaces such as ‘Expanded Coated’ (commercial offset printing with densities pushed to expand the color space).”

“Digital printing has pushed the industry to develop targets that take advantage of the ability of these devices to hit larger gamuts,” Weiss says. “So, now PrintWide is a very large gamut space that encompasses the abilities of these digital devices, while still maintaining neutral grays. There is also ongoing work with Expanded – or Extended – color gamut printing, which uses grange, green, and violet inks (and sometimes red, green, or blue) to expand the color space even more. These larger color spaces have evolved because people want to print what they can see, which is very difficult on a traditional CMYK device.”

Mark Greeves, sales and marketing director for Color-Logic, echoes that take on things, noting that “when digital printing came out, the intent was to make it match offset because that was the standard. You weren’t trying to show what [colors] digital printing could do, you just wanted to show that it could hit the standard— which was offset. And what you can do on a web offset press is very different versus what you can do on a sheetfed or flexo— it’s different inks and gamuts. And what people forget too is the substrates: a lot of times things look great in color management software, but they don’t adapt for the substrate.”

Today’s Color Spaces

This brings us back to the present, and to the color spaces used in digital printing— and more specifically wide-format— today. Even though strides have been taken, and more press manufacturers have come out with extended gamut inksets that allow a digital press to hit an even larger range of spot and Pantone colors natively than ever before, there still isn’t a single color space everyone adheres to. In most cases, a printer will choose one color space and ensure all the presses in the facility adhere to that standard, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the same file on the same substrate will look the same at another facility that has standardized using a different system.

That said, notes Weiss, “If by prominent, you mean the most used, it would be GRACoL (either 2006 or 2013). The reason for this is the ability of so many devices to hit this color space. When you want colors in a print campaign — think of a poster, a flyer, or a banner — to look as similar as possible, you need to use a target that all (or as close to all) devices can achieve. You’ll notice I did not say to match because it is virtually impossible to ‘match’ colors across different devices — even when aiming for the same target (such as GRACoL), because of the formulation of the inks.”

So, what’s really holding the wide-format space from rallying behind a single color space, with everyone agreeing to make that the new standard? According to Weiss, that is a more tricky question than it might seem.

“First, color is a theory that can and is interpreted differently by color experts,” Weiss says. “And color is very subjective— so what you want, or what I want, can be very different. And to make matters even more difficult are the competing factions internationally — which is why we have GRACoL in the US and Fogra in other areas. If you look at GRACoL 2013 and Fogra 51, they are virtually identical (Fogra 51 has a slightly bluer white point), meaning these two color spaces – developed independently – are almost identical. These are both specifications— and not standards— and that’s the rub. There are ISO standards— 12647-2, for instance— that a printer could reference, but there is still no ‘standard’ color space that everyone in the world uses.”

And that isn’t likely to change any time soon. Weiss goes on to note that, none of the current specifications or standards is really up to the task of becoming the default everyone refers back to. Weiss notes, “that has to do with the challenge of all digital processes having the ability to hit a universal color space. Mostly, this has to do with the lack of standardization of inks — everyone has their secret sauce with their inks, and try as you might, it’s very difficult (without limiting the color gamut of your device) to hit some of the targets. A good example is dye-sub printing, where the cyan ink consistently struggles to hit GRACoL targets. So, if you are just trying for good gray balance, you can hit it, but doing so limits the colors you can hit consistently. And remember, a target color space is only as good as the ability of a printer to hit it consistently with all their devices. That way, they can quantify their success or failure with measurements.”

Looking Ahead

What about in the future? Technology — hardware, software, inks, substrates, etc.— is all changing rapidly, so while we don’t have a single digital color space that can meet everyone’s needs today, will that remain true as we look into the crystal ball?

“I believe there will be consensus — it’s moving in this direction — for an international standard (ISO) color space (target) that will satisfy brands, ad agencies, printers, and customers,” Weiss says.

“Print is no longer parochial; it’s international, and the success of this industry is tied to consistent and repeatable color across the world, not just in our backyard.”

“We need to let digital be digital,” Geeves says. “All those extended gamut inks, the neons, the spot colors, the whites, the light cyans and magentas— all of those have been to get the color gamuts larger. You look at a Pantone book, and it’s full of 300 colors you can’t hit on a digital press. We need to start stressing what we can do on a digital press, with extended gamut inks, and not [keep trying to be like offset.].”

Geeves also notes that digital inks are “cleaner” than offset, with more pure pigments, which, in combination with inks such as violet or orange or green, really expand the gamut of what a digital press can do, and he believes the industry will really embrace that in the years to come. He keeps coming back to one thought: “let digital be digital,” with its own color spaces, rather than to keep trying to match it to an offset standard.

Both Geeves and Weiss stress that part of that process is on the software side as well, with today’s modern creative software still defaulting to outdated color profiles, even though they aren’t relevant anymore.

“For instance, Adobe software still has SWOP as its ‘default’ color space for CMYK, and sRGB as its ‘default’ color space for RGB. These are outdated color spaces and very limiting in today’s print world,” Weiss notes. “Because of this, it’s up to the printer and their creative team to educate their customers and help them update the color space where print is first created. Without doing this, all the hard work on color is cut off right at the beginning, which is a real shame.”

“We design in RGB because it gives us the widest color gamut, and when most people design, they don’t know where it’s going, or what it will be printed on,” says Geeves. “That’s why we have all those profiles [in Adobe] — in the end, you have to dumb it down.” But updating the defaults— and educating design clients on how to do that so they aren’t surprised by the end results— can go a long way toward mitigating frustrations stemming from everyone working and talking about different color spaces.

In the end, that’s what color spaces come back to: that common language everyone is speaking so we’re all on the same page, no matter what the final output is printed on— digital or offset, and regardless of the substrate.

Will the wide-format print industry ever agree on a single color space, or will we continue to all keep shouting at each other in several similar languages that are close enough to get the gist of what the other is saying, but something is always going to be lost in translation? That’s not an easy question to answer, but with every new upgrade, every new breakthrough, and every new revolution in technology, inks, and substrates, we get closer to that ideal universal language.