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.

[CBCB]

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.

So yes this is where it goes sideways. There is no standard.

It begs the question, then what is the baseline for the formulas in the first place then?

I mix it, print it onto a white swatch.

If this matters, then it seems odd they’ll just reformulate a colour when someone says it’s wrong.

What is the baseline for testing a colour?

[Atownsend]

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.

So yes this is where it goes sideways. There is no standard.

It begs the question, then what is the baseline for the formulas in the first place then?

I mix it, print it onto a white swatch.

If this matters, then it seems odd they’ll just reformulate a colour when someone says it’s wrong.

What is the baseline for testing a colour?

Take this with a grain of salt, because he sounds more like a sales guy than a lab guy when ive talked to him. But from what I was told by Max Price @ Avient at they use a 156 mesh on a white shirt for their ims formulas (at least for Rutland). If you email the color lab they will give you a formula for intended for an underbase. He said they will print it on a base and visually color match using CWF lighting.

I find it funny because in the freaking Pantone book it says to view the book under D50 light. The book even has a D50 lighting indicator to make sure you're viewing in D50. So if you're going to visually match to a Pantone standard you'd think you would want to at least go by their standards for viewing. On page 1 of the Pantone book it says its not supposed to be used for measurement, its just a guide. To me it seems unprofessional. Pantone has very clear standards for their colors and with netprofiler and a spectro everybody could be in alignment and calibrated to one standard. It seems like all of the other print, packaging, and big textile producers do it. Why cant we? The tools exist, Avient either doesn't use them or the people I've talked to dont have what they're talking about. I get the feeling that someone there must have a spectro, because if we get close to their lab conditions and print colors on a white garment with a mesh count similar to a 156 the color is usually close within 3 deltas to the centroid / Pantone data for the color.

[bimmridder]

Hell, use the same mesh count but use different whites and look at the differences. Educate your customers.

[tonypep]

Pantone sells a color matching booth for as much as $1,800 or you can get a generic one for under $300 FYI

[ebscreen]

Pantone sells a color matching booth for as much as $1,800 or you can get a generic one for under $300 FYI

We have one but it's obnoxious to use, you kind of have to rotate whatever it is you are viewing to find the correct viewing angle.
Sort of another reminder that we are the forgotten stepchildren of the printing industry.

more like a sales guy
Max Price

No way.

[Atownsend]

Pantone sells a color matching booth for as much as $1,800 or you can get a generic one for under $300 FYI

Are these generic booths LED or T12?? Our old booth uses T12's and finding D50 bulbs that actually output D50 light in the T12 variety is challenging. A lot of the bulbs that claim to be D50 are not actually spitting out D50... close but not quite. Would love to update this thing with something thats more accurate.

[ebscreen]

If this matters, then it seems odd they’ll just reformulate a colour when someone says it’s wrong.

I've always seen 156 base/156 color as standard specs for testing.

You have to figure they only mixed the 300 or so actual formulas required to be Pantone Approved,
and then extrapolated the rest from that data. Quite likely why they are okay with adjusting any problem
formulas as we're finding the errors in their data for them.

[tonypep]

We are redheaded stepchildren to be sure. Fact is, the ink companies know that most textile screen printers don't require sophisticated color matching for their customers. Again most. By a lot. This is why they usually carry 60+ RFU stock colors. Then there was Andy Anderson who had more than forty custom flesh tones made in house without color measurement tools. Or at Harlequin Nature Graphics we never used the Pantone book at all! We had hundreds of our own colors using our own alpha-numeric identification system. For the most part textile screenprinting is too much of a diverse application to bring under strict controls unlike processes like offset, where all manufacturers of CMYK inks had/have to adhere to very strict standards.
Did I just stir the ink pot?