PaC.Space – Packaging Color Management

A project of the ERA PRO Gravure working group

The purpose of the ERA Pro Gravure working group was to work out a common color standard for packaging gravure. Currently the brand owners and particularly the design or repro agencies are not always aware of the printing process, plate making or other pre-press properties, such as printing inks, substrates, printing presses, color gamut etc. In many cases, repro is done at a time when it is not yet defined where and how this specific job will be printed. The supplied pre-press data has to be reworked to fit into the final and individual requirements of the target process. The additional time needed, which could be avoided, increases the cost which nobody wants to pay for.

Unlike in offset printing, there is no gravure standard for packaging printing. Publication gravure has its standard, but this is much less complex than packaging. The packaging supply chain is characterized by a complex matrix of substrates, ink systems, finishing processes and also of supplied pre-press data. To make sure that a final print of a production machine looks like the agreed digital proof, a so called "Fingerprint Process" has to be set up.

The idea of PaC.Space is to provide a general gravure packaging color space, to allow a defined interface from supplied data to the process specific and printer specific needs. PaC.Space covers CMYK process colors. PaC.Space supplies the colorimetric description of that color space, and also color profiles to convert to this color space. Profiles are supplied as ICC profiles as well as GMG profiles. As the characterisation data of the PaC.Space is also supplied, it is possible to create own solutions such as profiles, device link profiles etc. All conversions can be done with standard tools.