Eye on Display speaks with Ray Weiss, Vice President of eLearning at Printing United Alliance, about the importance of colour management and good training
What is the true cost of getting colour wrong in a print job? It’s far more than just the wasted materials of a reprint. According to Ray Weiss of Printing United Alliance, inconsistent colour can lead to rejected jobs, ruined production schedules, lost clients who silently move to competitors, and even damage to a brand’s reputation when consumers question product quality.
In this interview, Ray Weiss explains why colour management is a fundamental, yet often overlooked, “minefield” for the entire print industry, from t-shirts and business cards to big banners and ‘Milk Duds’ packaging. He discusses the critical need for a common language around colour and how Printing United Alliance is providing solutions for the industry through targeted training and certification. https://www.ilearningplus.org/
Video interview and transcript below
Jack Gocher: Perhaps Ray, you could introduce yourself and what you do for Printing United, and of course, who they are.
Ray Weiss: I’m Ray Weiss, Vice President of eLearning and Certifications for Printing United Alliance. Printing United Alliance is a trade association representing printers and printer manufacturers in the United States. Our goal is to support and help printers wherever we can, and my focus is on our online learning platform.
I used to do only in-person training and it was starting to get harder to get people to travel, but COVID certainly changed everybody’s business model. And so we launched our platform in 2022.
Jack Gocher: You say printers, I’m going to assume that is printing across the board from business cards all the way up to big banners and posters.
Ray Weiss: That’s correct, including t-shirts and packaging. It goes on and on. Every now and then, someone will tell me, “Well, why are you in printing? That’s not that big an industry.” And I’m thinking, are you kidding me? Look at my shirt. This banner is real behind me.
Jack Gocher: We’re going to focus in, if we can, on a particular point of the print industry that people kind of forget about, but it’s almost the most important thing in some ways. We’re going to talk about colour and colour management. Perhaps we could start, if you could explain what we mean by colour management and why it’s important.
Ray Weiss: Really, none of us print in just black and white. Everybody’s applying colour to a substrate, whether it’s a shirt, a piece of metal, or a vinyl banner. I think of colour management as how we manage what’s going on in the background to make sure that when I want a red or a blue to print, that it prints the same across all different substrates. I also should be able to view it on my screen, which I know a lot of people are sceptical about, but you can dial it in so that what you see is very close to what you actually print. In our industry, it’s everything. Everybody’s printing colour. It’s fundamental.
Jack Gocher: I was reading some of your information and it’s described as a minefield. What are the consequences, financially and for reputation, of getting colour wrong in a print job?
Ray Weiss: I used to get people who would call in to ask for referrals to a printer. One of the call-ins was because the printer in their town could not print these sound panels a consistent colour. The manufacturer would always order a few extra, but what happens when they needed more? The printer in their town could never get the colour right. It was always, “Oh no, I reject it, go back and do more.” But then he discovered there was a printer in town who could get the colour right, but they were so busy that they couldn’t do his work. I think that correlates because they were getting the colour right and people start to discover that.
Most people don’t want to tell you that you’ve done a bad job. Usually, the way you’ll know that you’ve done a bad job is they leave. And that doesn’t even get into the whole issue of reprints. Your production person prints out a banner and the salesperson says, “That’s the wrong colour.” Well, now you’re throwing that banner away and reprinting it. And you’re trying to figure out how to adjust it, using non-scientific terms like “it’s too warm” or “it’s too cool.”
I was at a shop up in Toronto, and they had one of those big, fast, wide-format printers printing board after board. It takes six seconds to print a board, and they had those jobs timed perfectly all day. If you had to come back and say, “I’ve got to slide in this job because we got the colour wrong,” you’ve thrown your whole schedule off.
Then there’s the issue for brands. I was in a movie theatre once and I love Milk Duds. I walked over to buy them and the variance in colour on the box was shocking. It made me think, “Is there something wrong with those Milk Duds?” I realised, of course, it’s not. They probably just messed up their colour on a different print run. But it got out there, and now the consumer—me in this case—is questioning the product. That can be devastating for a company.
Jack Gocher: Consistency has to be the way forward. I understand that what you see on the screen isn’t necessarily what is printed, which has got to be a major part of the issue. Could you explain how Printing United Alliance is helping the industry with this?
Ray Weiss: We do a lot of training. We have a course called, “How do we evaluate and communicate colour?” so that everyone is talking about colour the same way. Then we also have colour management courses. We started off with fundamentals, which is really just foundational colour management knowledge. But because direct-to-garment, flexo, and offset all have little nuances, after that fundamentals course, we then go to the different market segments and have specific colour management for them.
We have those certifications, and of course our G7, but I think we’re going to talk about that in a minute. We try to provide training so that people in the industry can understand the importance of colour and become confident. Confidence is everything.
Jack Gocher: So is it about training people to ask the right questions, make sure they get the right input from their customers, and have files in the correct format? There’s a lot there, isn’t there?
Ray Weiss: Absolutely, it really is. Even with Adobe’s Creative Suite, the default colour space for CMYK is for web offset, and sRGB for RGB. If you design your job in that web offset space, you’re using a small colour space when your device can print a larger one, which means a larger field of colours to choose from. You’re limiting your output right from the get-go. Even if you’re not the creator, think about how beneficial you are to your customer when you say, “You know what, we could print more colour than what you’re sending. I’m happy to keep doing what you’re sending, but if you’d like to get more vibrant colours, we can do that.”
Jack Gocher: It’s almost like a key in music. Okay, so you touched on G7 Plus. I guess that’s something new that you’ve announced. Could you tell us what that is and the benefits?
Ray Weiss: It’s really an update. I think of it as a software update. If you’ve been in the industry for a while, I started off with Onyx 7, and it’s up to Onyx 25 now. If I were still using Onyx 7, I would probably not be very smart because they’ve improved it. And that’s what G7 Plus has done.
It’s kept the core of G7, so if you’re printing in the GRACOL colour space, your colours are not going to significantly change. But when you start printing in larger or other colour spaces, you’re still going to maintain that consistent neutrality. People will see the difference in grey before almost any other colour. It quickly jumps out at you, and that’s really what G7 is all about: getting the greys correct. They’ve enhanced it to print on more technologies because when it came out, it was really for commercial offset. The inventor of G7 said, “Wait a minute, we need to refine this, adjust it, enhance it so that it works better across all different printing technologies.” And so that’s really what G7 Plus is.
Jack Gocher: It seems this is aimed at people that are fairly experienced printers and designers. Do you have specific training for everyone in the workflow, like sales or production staff?
Ray Weiss: We do. Our Colour Management Professional certification not only covers all the different segments, but there’s one for creatives and one for sales. I was in sales for a number of years, and at one place I worked, they made all the salespeople understand how the printers worked mechanically. I could fix a printer, which meant that I understood its limitations so that I wouldn’t oversell it and create an unhappy customer.
If I’m a salesperson talking about colour and I say, “Yeah, we can hit that really vibrant purple,” and the production person is saying, “No, we can’t,” well, now I’ve messed up. I’ve got to go back to my customer and say, “You know what? I got a little ahead of myself. We really can’t hit that colour, but we can get close.” You’ve got to be very careful about the language you use. I’ve stricken the word “match.” You’ll never get me to say, “I’m going to make these two colours match,” because you won’t. But our eyes are really good at making those minute adjustments, and they will look, as long as I get them similar and I’m on the right hue, my eye goes, “Yeah, those are the same colours.”
Jack Gocher: How can people get involved? What’s the best way to get in touch?
Ray Weiss: All they have to do is go to our platform, ilearningplus.org. You don’t have to be a member of the Alliance, though there is a benefit. If you’re a member, you get a discount on courses. But you don’t have to be a member. We’ve done our best to divide up the courses into introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels. And up at the top, there’s a place where you can go right to the certifications. There are lots of ways that you can get to where you want to go. There are even free resources for everyone, like the GRACOL Color Space download. As a trade organisation for the printing industry, we feel we should provide those resources at no cost.
Jack Gocher: And for the end customers, is having this certification recognised as something of value?
Ray Weiss: It is, particularly G7. There are many brands that, when you get the RFP from them, require you to be a G7 qualified facility. So if you’re not, you’re out of the running for that job because the brand understands if you’re G7, they’ve got a better chance of you getting their colour right and getting it right across different substrates and processes. And that matters.
Jack Gocher: Obviously, UK people can access the training. Is there anything that’s different across different countries?
Ray Weiss: Well, Jack, we spell colour wrong! I did a class once in Australia, and I took my entire colour management deck and searched everywhere to make sure colour was spelled with a U. I told them, “I have localised my deck to Australia. I can’t do anything with the accent, but my deck is localised.”
We have 60 countries that access our platform currently, so there’s no limitation. We’re working hard on languages. We have a Spanish version of our Colour Management Professional Fundamentals. On our G7 Plus upgrade, we have Taiwanese and Mandarin. I’m working on Turkish right now, and then Spanish is next. We work with local people to do the translations because printing is a technical topic. If I say I’m going to “read a colour,” that’s different from “reading a book,” and you have to have a different translation, otherwise it’s wrong.
Jack Gocher: Excellent. But essentially, wherever you are in the world, it’s ilearningplus.org?
Ray Weiss: ilearningplus.org
Jack Gocher: Fabulous. Thanks so much for your time, Ray. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us, and I look forward to hearing more in the future.
Ray Weiss: Thank you. It’s been a pleasant time speaking with you.
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