1. MD: Randy, make believe our readers know nothing about G7. Please define it for us.

   Print buyers, agencies, and marketers want to be able to make things “look the same,” regardless of where or how they're printed. G7 is an improved method for matching color across multiple devices – it’s all about calibrating printing presses and proofing systems with the goal of repeatable, consistent color and images from proof to press, press to press, and even facility to facility. The G7 specification is managed by IDEAlliance, and the biggest breakthrough is its emphasis on gray balance “target values” to monitor and control color.

   The ‘G’ stands for the new calibrating Gray values and the ‘7’ for the core colors in our ISO printing rainbow . . .Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y), Black (K), Red (M+Y), Green (C+Y), and Blue (C+M).

   For print buyers, G7 means that if you are working with two or three firms – say one in New Hampshire, one in Chicago, and one in Texas – and all of them are G7 Masters, you can be more confident that the vibrant reds and yellows in your new marketing campaign will “visually match” across all three locations, regardless of whether it’s printed heatset web offset, sheetfed, inkjet or digital. . . and whether it’s a Point-of-Purchase display, brochure, self-mailer, or packaging.

   G7 has proven to be very adaptable and reliable across many printing processes, though I think you’ll find it most widely adopted in sheetfed shops right now. I can tell you that at Concord Litho, it’s getting us to color faster and more reliably on both our sheetfed and web presses - which is saving makeready time, reducing paper waste, and, best of all, making our customers happy. Three of our most color-conscious customers have raved about what their product looks like now compared to a year ago.

2. MD: So many graphic arts terms are confusing. Is G7 synonymous with GRACoL or with GRACoL 7? If not, can you clear up the confusion, please?

   I know, I know – total alphabet soup! The acronymns are different but related because they all involve IDEAlliance, a membership organization that’s been a real driving force for creating specifications and best practices in the industry. Here we go: GRACoL stands for General Requirements and Applications for Commercial Offset Lithography, the guidelines that have become the de facto rule of the land in printing shops everywhere for producing high-quality color print. These guidelines were developed by an IDEAlliance committee starting back in the mid 1990s. The term GRACoL nowadays pretty much refers to the committee itself, while its published guidelines are “GRACoL x” – GRACoL followed by the version number . . . like GRACoL 6, which came out in 2002, and the new GRACoL 7 in 2006.

   When GRACoL 7 came out, it was after a bunch of research and press runs. It emphasized “visual appearance” based proof to print, introduced the new gray scale calibration technique and more. And then came G7, IDEAlliance’s “Proof to Print” process. It’s the way you get to the goals and specifications laid out in GRACoL 7 - by employing the new gray scale calibration techniques based on principles of digital imaging, spectrophotometry, and computer-to-plate (CtP) technologies.

   Then came the “G7 Master” designation, which is the “seal of approval” granted by IDEAlliance to printing companies, ad agencies, and premedia shops who have successfully gone through the training, testing, press form auditing et cetera to meet the requirements. You have to renew/retest annually to maintain the G7 Master status, so that helps guarantee that once a plant is approved it will stay on its toes and maintain the methodology.

3. MD: How does G7 help your customers?

   Customers benefit because they’re getting the very best color management available today. Printers who are G7 have to prove that they can match proof, plates and press sheets - so the customer is getting a shop that runs tighter process controls than just using a pressman’s eyeball for color. Let’s not forget, the statistics point out that 1 in 12 men are colorblind! By using G7, you are measuring color with hand-held spectrodensitometers, which provide accurate numbers of where you are printing. Color has always been subjective, so why rely on human eyes when we have equipment capable of measuring color so accurately? Also, like I mentioned before, G7 Masters can produce proofs that can be easily matched at any other printer who had gone through the same process, so your files become portable, interchangeable.

   G7 also benefits the printer. G7 means that instead of just using SIDs (solid ink densities) as your measuring tool on press, you now have the option of using a spectrodensitometer to measure gray balance. If your color is off, by measuring the gray balance it will help you know what direction to go. In the plant just last week on our largest web, the press foreman came up to me and said, “That job we had on second shift last night, I had to sign off on the color. I ran the job up to density and could not believe that it matched the proof exactly. Fastest make-ready I have ever had on that type of job.”

4. MD: Do your customers have to prepare their files any differently, because of G7?

   No. If the customer provides their file and we proof it, we now have even greater confidence that we can match the proof. What’s great is we can accept G7 proofs from other firms, including advertising agencies and premedia shops, and really have a leg up on getting to color swiftly. We scan the G7 colorbar on the proof to check that it’s within the correct range and we’re off and running. An important caveat is that the paper you proof on should be what you plan to print on for the most reliable results.

5. MD: What is the significance of Concord Litho’s "Master Printer" status?

   Being a G7 Master Printer means we have invested the time and money to calibrate presses to plates to proofs, to train our people on the methodology, and are vigilant in monitoring the process daily by reading colorbars for solid ink densities, gray balance and dot gain. In our case here at Concord Litho, we also used a lot of paper in the testing process – because we achieved G7 not just in our sheetfed division, but also in our heatset web division, which really is quite a milestone. I think we’re one of 30 printing companies in the country to do that, and last I checked the online database, there were 350 printing companies, prepress providers and advertising agencies who are now G7 Masters. It shows that we took the effort to become better and more consistent day in and day out, that we are firmly committed to industry best practices and modern color management, and that we want our customers to have the best looking print that “plays well” with all the other components of their campaigns. For all printers it should reduce waste and makeready times. And, being “Totally Selfish Prepress Guy,” it keeps me from getting 3 am wake-up calls from the foremen saying they can’t match color on press.

6. MD: Where can our readers go on the Web to learn more about G7?

   I definitely recommend spending some time on the IDEAlliance website (www.idealliance.org), as they are the people who are truly making a difference with these best practices and specifications. We also have some resource web links on the G7 page of our website, including links to good articles and, of course, ColorWiki (www.colorwiki.com).

Thanks, Randy! For more information about Concord Litho, please visit http://www.concordlitho.com.