Photo Customers Want Color Consistency as well as a "Pretty Picture"…

Nancy Chetron, Worldwide Marketing Manager
Production Customization/Workflow & Solutions, Xerox Corporation

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about color consistency, color management and color maintenance. And rightfully so! Producing the right color is just as important as producing the same color…over many prints and across multiple printers.
Shops who print for the photo marketplace have some unique needs. They recognize the critical nature of color consistency and accuracy, but they also want to achieve the most realistic, representational color.  When it comes to photo images, their customers want a pleasing appearance as well as excellent shadow detail, depth, contrast and smooth gradients.
So how can you achieve all this while maintaining consistency?
A simple, fast, color management solution, Xerox MatchAssure, has been introduced worldwide and provides highly accurate ICC compliant Destination Profiles using a single spectrophotometer for all printers and just one scanning of each set of printed targets.  MatchAssure also includes additional GUI options, allowing for the look of the output to be adjusted based on the desired preference for skin tones, skies, lightness and contrast.
If you are familiar with the term “Memory colors”, you know the name originates from our desire for elements, such as the sky and skin tones, to look the way we remember them…even if they aren’t a precise match to reality.  For many applications, we care more about having an aesthetically pleasing image than having an absolutely precise color match.  Now, skin tones and skies can be adjusted with a slider bar without changing the rest of the image.  If the skies look too warm for your taste,  just shift the sky slider bar toward “more blue” and voilà – perfect skies without negatively affecting the rest of the output!
MatchAssure was designed by Xerox to help customers achieve consistent color across multiple Xerox printers and sites, whether printing RGB or CMYK source files.  It works with Xerox as well as selected other print technology and can be used with multiple DFEs such as FreeFlow Print Server, EFI and Creo.  MatchAssure delivers outstanding matching against any of the print specifications or industry standards such as GRACoL or Fogra.
For those using a CMYK workflow, a new feature is available to enable customers to inspect their CMYK accuracy against a GRACoL or Fogra press standard.
How could your business be impacted by a color management solution providing fast and simple profile creation to help you achieve and manage greater color consistency across your fleet of digital presses? 
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MatchAssure is just one of the many Xerox technology tools available as part of the Confident Color portfolio. For more information on MatchAssure, please click here.