Top performance through process control
Andreas Kraushaar is head of prepress department at Fogra and acts as president of the German Color Society.
What can you tell us about the FOGRA media wedge and what does process control mean for you?
What is process control?
The trend we see in those cases is that any industry, sooner or later, faster or slower, move toward an industrial process.
That means we try to move from a more visual base to a more objective measurement-based way. And if you have happened to have customers expecting a certain quality, a certain level of color accuracy for spot color matching GRACoL and or FOGRA, then you are needed, you are requested to print the expected and to double check and going to industrial printing, going more to the industrial way of working this kind of objective report gives you the right fundamental tool to objectify you’re doing, to objectify your work.
And also a lot of what people do not always explicitly ask for the quality, but those kind of quality leaders, they are using those tools to check whether they are on the top edge of technology and printing industrially that meaning the same day in day out shift by shift and they develop individual quality tracking and monitoring to measure that kind of color accuracy over time over the machine, to have a dashboard kind of quality evaluations, to see what happens in their print side.
What is the FOGRA media wedge?
The idea when developing the Fogra media wedge was twofold, one is to find a control element that reflects the process control needs, in particular for large format printing, where we would like to get underlying process information about media, about uniformity, about everything which is specific to the process whereas the other side is checking the color accuracy, that means if you happen to have a reference, whatever it is a Fogra standard or your house standard a GRACoL or whatever.
And then the level of similarity, the level of visual similarity is important. And the wedge was also designed to reflect that, to identify how close your actual print is in respect to a given reference, if that is of importance to your specific use case.
Thank you, Andreas, for sharing your knowledge. We learned about how a media watch is useful for process control and what the industry trends are. And now it’s your turn to become a top performer with measurement technology from Barbieri.
