Idealliance Announces Second Phase of its ‘Expanded Gamut’ Project

The Alexandria, Virginia-based International Digital Enterprise Alliance, better known as Idealliance, announces that its Print Properties and Colorimetric Council Expanded Gamut Subcommittee has begun conducting expanded gamut press testing. The Expanded Gamut Subcommittee was started in the fall of 2017 and includes expert committee members from across the global print community, including manufacturers, print experts, color scientists and a wide range of international printing sites.

Idealliance is a non-profit industry think tank with 12 strategically located offices around the world. It claims to be recognized by ISO as the industry’s foremost certifying body for competencies, systems, materials, and facilities and the world’s foremost contributor to ISO standards.

The nonprofit says its Expanded Gamut project has four objectives:

• Develop a test chart intended for use with universal ECG printing (seven colors, CMYK+OGV). The chart is designed to be usable by most profiling software and contains an optimized patch set based on the needs of leading industry software developers.
• Create a set of leading practices and a calibration method for use with seven-color expanded gamut printing. These practices and methods will also be suitable for five and six color Expanded Gamut print. These methods will contain example aims for seven color printing.
• Create an Expanded Gamut Proofing Control Strip, based on a subset of the patches above.
• Create an example Expanded Gamut Characterization Dataset for use in everyday expanded gamut print.

The committee is made up of developers, color scientists and international experts from across the print industry. Among those represented on the subcommittee are Color-Logic, Kodak, GMG, Esko, Agfa and others, along with industry leading consultants and other graphics arts manufacturers.

The second revision of the Expanded Gamut test chart is currently being tested with a series of live press runs. Once the test chart is complete, the committee will move on to a series of 20 controlled test runs, which will be conducted across Idealliance’s 12 international offices on a variety of print processes and substrates. Final results, including the target, press measurements, and characterization data will be shared with the international community.

The Expanded Gamut CMYK+OGV project is the second phase of Idealliance’s Expanded Gamut project. The first phase produced the XCMYK characterization dataset, which is widely used by wide-format, digital and offset, greatly increasing the color gamut of products produced using this dataset.

To learn how you can become involved in the Idealliance Expanded Gamut project, contact Ron Ellis, Print Properties & Colorimetric Council chairman, at ron@ronellisconsulting.com or Timothy Baechle, CEO of Idealliance, at tbaechle@idealliance.org.