Marc Levine is a member of GMG Americas’ senior management team as Director of Business Development. In this role, Levine helps to expand the adoption of GMG technology across all print segments.

Levine has 25 years of experience selling, supporting, developing, and driving business on products built on color across different print verticals, including wide format printing, commercial printing, and packaging. He has worked for and with several technology and service companies. At Schawk, he was the Director of the Enterprise Print Quality program. Marc was focused on the packaging—helping brands to optimize their packaging color on the shelf and to produce more consistent and durable brand equity. He also managed a team of experts focused on implementing best practices and standardization. Previously, Levine was Director of Business Development at the Color Management Group. He worked with manufacturer partners, resellers, and customers on strategic sales and marketing programs to improve business performance based on color technology products. Levine has also held technical and sales roles at X-Rite Inc and NUR Macroprinters.

Levine holds a BS in Graphic Design from Northeastern University, with additional studies in Figure Study and Photography at Scoula del Verde. He is a published author and regular contributor to the industry.

Industry Standard Data Set Development for ECG

Marc Levine, GMG Color

Over the past few decades, the profession print community has widely embraced the use of industry standards to streamline their print production processes. Using standardized aims, authored by industry specification groups such as Idealliance™ (G7) and FOGRA, printers have been able to harmonize color across print machines, helping them print more consistently with greater efficiency. That means, using industry standards, printers have been able to print with better quality and turn work faster, helping them be more competitive and profitable with their print business.

The core concept of using industry standards is as follows:

  1. A set of target aim values is developed by the industry specification group. They reach out to a set of printers who are selected to represent “how the industry prints”
  2. Print requirements and test forms are shared with the printers, so that the forms may be properly printed and shared back to the industry standard group.
  3. The industry specification group then evaluates and processes the data and creates a characterization data set (also called a “Characterized Reference Print Condition”), which is intended to provide a set of clear targets that any printer, using a similar print process (printing technology, substrate, and finishing) can align their printing machine to using a clearly defined and reliable calibration methodology.
  4. The data set is then made available to the industry, along with a set of suggested methodologies to describe how to align a print process to the target
  5. Typically, the industry organization will also make a qualification program available in which they will collect samples from a printer, measure them, and determine if they have matched the standard aim values to an acceptable degree.

In the world of 4-color (CMYK) printing, use of industry standards to standardize print process is common practice. However, printers are now facing a new technology landscape that has enabled new ways to print. While digital print has been emerging for over a decade, digital print technology has now matured to a state where it is consistently replacing analog print systems. Part of that maturity has been around the inks or colorants. As digital print requires a fixed set of inks, special colored-inks cannot be used to match spot colors in the same way that it has been done for analog printing. To overcome this, digital print machine manufacturers are increasingly making extended-gamut process inks available in their printing machines. We are now seeing more and more machines available with different combination of red, orange, blue, violet, and green inks… allowing those machines to produce wider gamut (range of colors) so that images have more fidelity and spot colors can be matched more closely.

Extended color printing is not a newconcept and has been in practice for 3 decades (Pantone introduced the 6-color Hexachrome process in 1995). However, best practices for that print process were not fully developed early on. In addition, the available color management technology required to reliably separate raster images and spot color content did not meet early expectations and has undergone its own revolution in performance.

In summary, in today’s print world, whether you are bringing in newer digital technology or optimizing your olderanalog print technology, extended color printing is part of your new reality. That means the print world now needs to advance print specifications beyond CMYK, provide aims for extended color printing, and a way to qualify you extended color process printcondition to those standard aims.

In 2021, the Idealliance Print Properties Committee took on a charter to accomplish exactly this: to create and industry-standard extended color data set (using a 7-color CMYKOGV print process) that can be used by printers to standardize the way the print with 7 colors. The journey will require several steps, which includes the creation of the aim data set, testing at printers to gauge matching capability, possible development of new methodologies, and sharping of requirements that make the processes practically useful and beneficial for printers.

This paper outlines the early part of the process in which requirements & targets were shared with printers, data measured and processed, and a set of target characterization data was built. Included in the paper will be technical details about the source data sets and how they were harmonized into a single data from which Idealliance will continue the journey to author a 7-color extended gamut print specification.