Idealliance’s XCMYK Specification Improves Expanded Gamut Printing

For many people, color management is like the weather. Everyone talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. But new machines with new ink sets are turning what was always a tricky issue into an even trickier one.

For many printers, “color management” is more or less synonymous with GRACoL, SWOP, or FOGRA. GRACoL, which stands for “General Requirements for Applications in Commercial offset Lithography,” was developed in 1966, and—long story short—is a standard specification for color reproduction. More recent versions of GRACoL are based on the popular G7 specifications. (SWOP stands for “Specifications for Web Offset Publications,” while FOGRA was developed by Germany’s Fogra Graphic Technology Research Association and is primarily used in Europe.)

Reading these basic descriptions, you can see the problem: these color specification standards were developed for lithographic printing, in particular four-color litho. That’s all well and good if you have an offset press. But today’s wide-format printers—and even digital small-format machines—print more than four colors. In fact, most printer manufacturers strongly tout the expanded gamut that their machines are capable of printing.

As a result, printers who want to color manage their output in order to match output from one machine to another, one job to another, or for other reasons, have to use these standard specifications, but doing so restricts the output to CMYK, effectively ignoring the expanded gamut. (You’ve probably seen this principle at work when you convert from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop; you immediately note that colors are more muted and less vibrant, simply because CMYK has a much narrower color gamut than RGB.)

“On a wide-format device, standard print specifications like GRACoL can really restrict your gamut,’” said Ron Ellis, G7 and Process Control Expert, and GRACoL Chair. “What printers notice is that if they have no color management on, they have much more vivid and brighter colors. If they turn color management on, everything looks faded and muted. GRACoL is excellent, but it for those who have a larger gamut it is time for a color space that fits better.”

Enter XCMYK. Developed by Idealliance, XCMYK is a new color space that covers the expanded gamut printing capable of being output on the latest offset and digital devices, including wide-format machines. After 15 months’ worth of international test runs, the new color space was released last November.

GRACoL can hit about 70% of Pantone colors, said Ellis, and XCMYK boosts that to 83%. Still, some of the newer digital machines boast Pantone color matching in the 98% to 99% range, so XCMYK still has some limitations.

“With a newer Epson, you can hit about 98% of [Pantone colors],” said Ellis. “XCMYK doesn’t let let you take full advantage of the wide-gamut machines, but it’s much more than you get with GRACoL FOGRA, and SWOP. If you look at an Indigo or a lot of inkjet presses, they can’t print as wide [a gamut] as an Epson or a Roland, so XCMYK goes where they can go.”

The reason for this is that the principle of the XCMYK specification is to boost the ink densities of the four color primaries, and as a result doesn’t take into account the extra-CMYK inks that are found in many wide-format printers, like orange (O), violet (V), green (G), or even blue (used by Xerox) and red (used by Epson). (Interestingly, a study conducted by Multi Packaging Solutions, UK, found that the CMYKOGV gamut is only 14% bigger than XCMYK gamut.) Idealliance itself is working on a seven-color (CMYKOGV) specification that can hit 99% of Pantone colors, which is of particular interest to packaging printers.

The XCMYK specification is a free download from Idealliance, and there are two ways of using it. The basic way is to load it into the RIP, and then process an output file using the XCMYK spec, much like one would use GRACoL. However, although that will provide an observable benefit, the color space should be specified much earlier in the workflow. “The big benefit would be to separate your artwork from RGB into this color space, or design in this color space in Creative Cloud,” said Ellis. “They can pop [XCMYK] into Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign. Even CorelDraw.”

For the average wide-format printer, aid Ellis, “pop it into their RIP—Caldera, EFI, or Onyx—and go from tiny color space to something much larger.”

The following images show the new color space at work. Compare the original image (Figure 1) to that image output using GRACoL (Figure 2) and then the same image output using XCMYK (Figure 3). The XCMYK version is more vibrant than the GRACoL version.

Idealliance is working with the major vendors to include XCMYK in the next round of RIP software upgrades. The seven-color specification is in development and is slated to be unveiled sometime in 2017. But for most wide-format folks, XCMYK will still be a vast improvement over the current litho-based color specifications, and certainly better than no color management.

“If you have a printer that can print to a relatively wide gamut, you can get much better results by using XCMYK than by using standard print profiles,” said Ellis, “It’s not as wide a gamut as an Epson, but it’s wider than what people are probably getting right now.”

At the end of the day, he said, “The customer likes it. It’s bright and vivid.”