How accurate are your colors?

[CBCB]

You’re right and we did the same thing for a bit. Mixed it by eye. Now we try to mix it right away so if it’s wrong we have time to wait for Wilflex to figure it out. We can get it right, but only after quite a bit of fussing.

[tonypep]

Then there is metamerism. Also ink film thickness which can often affect hue and intensity. Especially with translucent colors/pigments. Think of most royal inks for example. A couple of press adjustments and the color easily can be shifted by several shades. Long topic but that is why many of us adjust in house. At Nike/ Hilfiger etc. We often had several formulas for the same PMS colors depending on application. Difficult to manage to be sure, but necessary.

[tonypep]

Ha! Point in case. Yesterday had a 6K piece order PMS 302 (my formula) on Heliconia shirts. I prefer this color to be fairly translucent for this application. Reverse engineered to have a thin under base and relatively decent not thick over print. So UB mesh 196 top color 158. Running on a couple of presses so two sets of screens. The ops made a mistake and set them up with two 196 screens on one press and two 158s on another. No suprise......same ink but application yielded two very different colors. Had to reset but I proved my own point. As soon as I saw the two prints side by side I knew exactly what happened. This is why it is difficult for ink software be completely accurate all the time. It will pretty much never happen.