Hi there ! Alvaro asked me to introduce myself to the readers of our Compose newsletter.
My name is Michael Jahn, and I will be part of the support team for North and South America for Compose.
I have worked for prepress service providers, directed a prepress facility for gravure and heatset off set, worked for prepress solution developers like Agfa and Enfocus and worked with Pantone on a hexachrome for flexography project, all of which made me better understand the process between a designers idea and a printed sample.
I am tasked with helping existing customers keep their Compose solution working smoothly and reliably as well as help set up, install and train new customers. Compose offers a wide variety of easy to set up workflow tools, but as you know, it is paying attention to the dialog boxes, set up and software settings that makes for smooth operation.
Feel free to contact me directly by email michaelejahn at composeusa.com with your questions, concerns or comment, and I will do my level best to find the answers or work arounds - as someone who worked in the trade on projects with firm deadlines, I appreciate and respect your level of urgency !
This month I got to calibrate a very fast narrow web press. This press can print at 700' per minute. Getting the color right quickly is paramount. Failing to do so, implies an incredible amount of wasted paper. A clear issue was that the press was plugging values over 80%, specially on the black channel.To calibrate the press I used our Ink Optimizer product. Basically I created an ICC of the press by averaging measurements from several press sheets. This to allow for press variations. The paper being used on press was type 1. The press' CMYK Lab values were within the GRACoL ICC profile and ISO tolerances. However, the RGB values were quite off. I configured our Ink Optimizer to have GRACoL was the input color space (profile). As for output, I used the ICC I created for the customer. This makes all jobs, processed by our ink optimizer and printed on the customer's press, to look like they were printed on a G7 calibrated sheet feed press. The results were very impressive, no more plugged shadows. Colors were bright and crisp. We printed a sample job that uses well known images and they matched the GRACoL samples I had with me. The customer was very happy, so was I. Have you though about calibrating your press? Give us a call and we'll help you get there.
I visited Epson to print some sample files on the Stylus Pro WT7900. One of the files was of Holiday wrapping paper. I was so impressed by it that I shot a short video and posted it to you tube. The use of white on clear film, when mixed with other colors gives the impression of metallic inks. Enjoy.
