Few printing companies can boast the extensive range of services, all under one roof, found at Pegaus Print Group. Offset, wide format flatbed, digital, flexo, finishing, embellishing, warehousing, fulfillment. All of this output, destined for major supermarkets, publishers and corporations, requires harnessing and Fujifilm is delivering the solution with XMF workflow and cloud-based ColorPath for ISO colour assurance.
Like its winged horse namesake, the 24/6 operation of Pegasus Print Group, headquartered in Sydney’s industrial suburb of Blacktown, needs to fly fast. The stallion Pegasus carried Zeus’ thunderbolts and lightning – what might mythologically be called ‘workflow’ at the speed of light – but is definitely a reality for the 240 employee company serving some of Australia’s most recognizable brands. It accomplished this with one of the world’s most advanced workflows – Fujfilm XMF v6.
“We are told by USA Fujifilm people that few, if any, printers worldwide are pushing XMF, XMF Remote and ColorPath as hard as we do here,” says Prepress Manager Joe Vassallo, a highly experienced veteran of the changes in prepress and colour management that began as an indentured scanner operator.
Like most workflows, XMF is modular, you take what you want or need from the functionalities. XMF is a pure PDF workflow with JDF native architecture for flexible, end-to-end or partial job instructions to every device involved in production. It boasts excellent connectivity with other software such as MIS, pre-flighting (Enfocus), RIPs, proofing (Black Magic at Pegasus) and other workflows such as FreeFlow which is bundled with Xerox digital presses deployed at Pegasus. It is the first workflow to be based on Adobe’s APPE PDF Print Engine from day one. Today it is the first workflow to use Adobe’s Print Engine 3 and Mercury RIP architecture.
XMF even reaches out into online space with XMF Remote, an HTML5-compatible client visualization service and ColorPath, a cloud-based application that ensures compliance to ISO 12647 colour standards, on all ISO-capable output devices. Both are used extensively at Pegasus.
Let’s start with offset
Pegasus is exclusively a Heidelberg print shop, with Speedmaster 12-colour, 10-colour and 5-colour presses sitting side-by-side in a cavernous press hall. Heidelberg jobbing presses and even older cylinder machines for die-cutting and embossing are dotted around.
“We fingerprint each press,” explains Vassallo, ”and develop characterisation curves for each one to bring it within ISO 12647-2 colour control standards. ColorPath ensures this and also sends instructions to our three Epson proofers, driven by Serendipity Blackmagic software. A fourth proofer is used for impositions, an excellent guide for press operators.”
Pegasus has two Fujifilm high-productivity plate lines, one with a five-cassette autofeed. Long print runs in the hundreds of thousands mean that violet – Fujifilm LV-NV2 – are the preferred plates. XMF feeds colour-corrected PDF data to these two platesetters with ease thanks to Fujifilm’s deployment of Adobe’s Mercury RIP architecture, which can RIP to multiple devices simultaneously.
“Clients still like to see hard copy proofs,” says Vassallo, “but we are finding since implementing ColorPath and ISO 12647, some are now happy to approve jobs on XMF Remote or in their offices, knowing that we will deliver correct and predictable colour. The old days of press checks and subjective debates over a shade of colour are rapidly diminishing.”
Walking through Pegasus’ prepress and production areas bears this out by seeing the same jobs proofed, printed offset, digital and wide-format with not only matched colour, but colour that looks fantastic, saturated, vibrant, with faithful skin tones, neutral grays and luscious greens, reds and blues.
“It’s a culture of colour excellence,” explains Vassallo, “the software enables it but everyone in the production chain must be devoted to the process of ISO 12647 and use it correctly. We use spectrophoto-meters and special colour bars and all this data is archived and back-referrable: an ever-expanding knowledge base of ICC profiles, substrates and machine capability.”
Bringing digital into the ISO fold
An increasing number of Pegasus’s client campaigns involve both offset and digital output. Brand labels too, but more on that later. If the presses are fingerprinted to print ISO 12647-2, the digital devices must also produce the same colour. This is where the ISO system is still catching up on advanced markets such as Australia, which has adopted digital faster than any other country. 12647-2 is an offset standard. The ISO committees came up with ISO 12647-7 and 12647-8 applicable to digital proofing devices and for validation prints produced by digital data.
ColorPath within XMF workflow uses these standards to create Device-Link Profiles for Pegasus’s iGen4 and Color 1000 digital presses, and works seamlessly with Xerox FreeFlow software.
“It’s an on-going process and we are working towards creating Device Link Profiles from offset press sheets so that FreeFlow receives colour-managed PDF files for matched output on the Color 1000 and iGen4. We are essentially using these digital presses like proofing devices!” says Vassallo, adding “ColorPath brings it all together in the Cloud, it makes colour a lot simpler to manage.”
To emphasize the accuracy of the colour-managed Xerox devices, some of Pegasus’ publication customers are already receiving fully made-up ‘dummies’ stitched into books on the same stock and with the same colour as the offset print run will deliver.
Point-of-purchase
Next time you are in a supermarket, look at the hanging posters and POP displays. If you notice exceptional colour, matched to the brochures, magazine ads, catalogues and competition entry forms – chances are that it was printed by Pegasus on one of their EFI VUTEk flatbed & roll UV printers.
“I suppose we made things difficult for ourselves in that we have both EFI VUTEk UV and LED-UV devices,” smiles Vassallo, “and this means different inks, curing and characteristics. However, by using the same principle of characterizing each machine and EFI controller, we are able to print consistent, matched colour and get XMF to export colour-managed files to the EFI RIPs. Our goal is to bring all of our output devices to within ISO-12647 print specifications.”
Considering that, when Vassallo joined Pegasus almost ten years ago, there was virtually no colour management in place, the situation today is remarkable. Since then, everything in the workflow has either been brought into or prepared to be included in a fully colour-managed ISO environment.
All devices are measured and linearised on a weekly basis to keep output within ISO-12647 specification.
Labels next?
Pegasus houses several multi-colour flexographic narrow-web presses, producing brand labels in both long and shorter runs. Plates are bought-in from an outside trade house so, at the moment, flexo is not part of the XMF workflow, although it could be. “We are keeping a careful eye on digital label presses. They seem to be advancing at a very fast rate in both linear speed and productivity. Flexo, gravure and screen processes will probably always exist for narrow-web but in a market such as Australia, digital appears to be a valid addition to the output mix.”
“Overall, we are delighted with XMF and ColorPath, “ notes Vassallo. “Fujifilm’s technical support, online support and training is second-to-none. Jobs are really flying through our business and quality, I believe, is the best achievable. We will soon upgrade to dedicated 64-bit servers and this will make it fly even faster.
“Everyone wants critical colour these days, even real estate clients. Brand managers want logos and Pantones to be consistent, photographers want their RGB files faithfully reproduced. XMF with ColorPath does all the conversion work – it makes a complex workflow so much simpler,” he said.
