パッケージ印刷におけるスポットカラーとデジタル色管理

抄録

Recently, decreasing offset commercial printing sales has become a trend in the printing industry. On the other hand, package printing has continued with relatively steady sales. Several styles exist for carrying out package printing, such as Gravure, Flexo, Silk as well as offset printing. In the field of commercial printing, the four-color process printing is the standard, and in the field of packaging, spot color is the standard. Toyo Ink has been working on color management and leading industrial standardization. For the past few years, Toyo Ink has tried to establish Gravure lamination film standards with focus on the standardization of the packaging field. The standardization of printing and a standard color for offset printing became popular in the Japanese industry by the ISO-based Japan Color 2011. Along with the management method, the evaluation tools have been established as well. However, setting a particular standard environment in the field of packaging is extremely difficult owing to the variety in the styles of printing spot colors being used. In process color printing, for controlling the color matching of a press output via CMYK process colors, it is crucial to maintain decent printing conditions to enable high-grade printing. Alternatively, for color matching of spot colors, the ink of the objective color is created by using base color inks before printing; hence, color management of the mixing ink process is of great importance. For the judgment of the spot color, colorings, and aesthetic evaluation, visual comparison is commonly used. The color management of spot color performed with package printing is analogous. There are certain reasons why spot color management is mainly analogous. PantoneLIVE is a tool to solve these problems, and enable digital color management in the field of packaging. PantoneLIVE is a cloud type database used for digital colorings of Pantone books. In the conventional book colorings, only one standard color existed. The idea of PantoneLIVE has two standards for each spot color; one called “Master standard” and other called “Dependent standard”. “Dependent standard” is a subset of the “Master standard”, defined according to the style of printing such that it is easier to perform color matching. Various tools are available for the simple and effective handling of the database in PantoneLIVE. To manage Pantone LIVE workflow, the purchase of a license to access the digital color library is required. Toyo Ink group acquired the PantoneLIVE AIM (Accredited Ink Manufacturer) certification from X-Rite/Pantone (U.S.A.), and are authorized to sell and support PantoneLIVE workflow. The Toyo Ink group will support customers in the digital color management of the packaging industry together with X-Rite Video JET, Japan.