By: Dr. Kiran Deshpande
Sustainability is becoming increasingly important in the printing industry, including packaging printing. Print buyers, brand owners, converters, and suppliers are all seeking ways to meet their sustainability objectives. Achieving these goals requires collaboration across the entire value chain. Color management can play a crucial role in making the printing process more sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective.
Understanding color management
First of all, we need to understand what do we mean by color management. I remember many conversations where people misunderstood color management as just measuring colors or applying color profiles in the prepress. In fact, the scope of color management is much wider than that. It can optimize the entire color process workflow and printing conditions across the supply chain.
Simply put, color management ensures consistent, accurate, and predictable colors throughout the workflow, from design through prepress, print production to the final product on supermarket shelves, where consumers connect with printed products.
Here are some of the ways in which you can leverage color management to achieve your sustainability goals, improve your operational efficiency and business benefits.
Color workflow optimization across the supply chain
Color process optimization across the workflow provides plenty of opportunities for boosting productivity and sustainability. Take an example of the substrates used in your workflow. Whether you are a brand owner or a print converter, you can streamline your portfolio of the substrates. This will result in the optimization of inks based on their compatibility with substrates and final products.
The same goes for press conditions such as plates and blankets for offset printing, anilox rollers for flexographic printing and doctor blades for gravure printing. In the prepress, you can review
your workflow to find out any gaps and opportunities for standardization such as screening methods, screen angles, RIP settings etc.
Consistent color, faster press setup, and reduced material waste are achievable by using standardized printing conditions. Organizations like Idealliance and Fogra offer characterization data sets that define these conditions for different printing processes and substrates. These data sets and associated ICC (International Color Consortium) profiles are available through the ICC website (1,2,3). Choosing appropriate standard printing conditions, combined with an effective press calibration method, such as G7, will significantly enhance print quality and efficiency.
Color management offers some techniques which result in ink savings. For example, in CMYK printing, traditionally Gray Component Replacement (GCR) is used to replace the neutral CMY component with black ink in neutral and chromatic regions. Similarly, there are ‘ink optimization tools’ available in different color management software applications to minimize ink consumption.
Color automation tools
Color automation is another area which could provide significant efficiency. This includes in-press scanning spectrophotometer and quality monitoring systems, cloud-based color QC tools, prepress automation software applications etc. These tools help maintain color consistency and reduce manual intervention, leading to fewer errors and less waste.
You can reduce the number of approvals, including on-press approvals, throughout the supply chain. Consider using remote proofing tools and online (web-based) color approval systems.
Managing spot colors
Brand owners and designers can influence a lot of parameters in the printing supply chain. Think about the number of brand colors or spot colors in your palette across the design portfolio. By analyzing the spot colors in CIELAB color space we can eliminate the redundant colors, and then rationalize the spot color database. Some brands have even restricted the use of specific pigments to improve color consistency and sustainability.
In one project, we managed to reduce the number of spot colors in the portfolio by 32% using colorimetric analysis. Depending on your current scenario, this number could be more or less. It will simplify the process by reducing the number of inks, color matching time and waste material.
Designers can also contribute to sustainability by selecting colors (for a new artwork or product) that facilitate recyclability. For instance, lighter shades of colors with higher lightness values (L*) have better de-inking potential, making them more eco-friendly.
Sensible tolerances
Printing involves mechanical, chemical, electronic and digital processes. There are inherent process limitations which should be mitigated with sensible tolerances. Note that ‘sensible’ is a key word here.
One of the fundamental metrics that we use for color quality monitoring is ΔE or color difference between the target color and the printed color. There are different mathematical formulas to calculate the color difference, such as ΔE76 and ΔE2000. There are other metrics used for print quality assessment such as tone values, gray balance, tonality, metamerism index etc. It’s imperative to keep these tolerances realistic according to the process limitation of your printing conditions. Overly tight tolerances can lead to increased material waste, longer production times, and a higher carbon footprint. Because quality comes with a price.
For instance, reducing default color tolerances by 0.5 ΔE2000 could translate into hundreds of extra press hours, increased material usage and higher carbon footprint of your production and supply chain. It’s like a butterfly effect from chaos theory where tiny actions can have significant consequences.
On the other hand, you can’t just loosen the ΔE tolerance without optimizing the process first. Make sure that the variables are optimized and the process is stable before adjusting tolerances. There are several tools for color quality control like spectrophotometric devices and quality monitoring software applications.
Final printed product and market expectations also play a role. Luxury product packaging, like a premium cognac, would require stricter tolerances than FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) packaging, like a soft drink bottle. Metrics like the E-Factor can help correlate the color difference with your personal expectation for an acceptable color match (4).
Expanded Color Gamut (ECG) printing
Traditionally, packaging printing relies on spot colors with dedicated inks for brand colors. However, with shorter print runs and more product variations, this approach increases wash-ups, waste, and costs.
Expanded Color Gamut (ECG) printing replaces spot colors with a fixed ink set, typically using CMYK plus Orange, Green, and Violet (CMYKOGV). This method boosts productivity by enabling multiple designs and SKUs to be printed in a single job, reducing press wash-ups, setup time, ink waste, and overall carbon footprint. The graph shows potential improvements in various KPIs based on one study (5). In addition, ECG printing can enhance the vividness of your images so that the final printed product stands out on the shelf.
It uses n-color printing where ‘n’ is a number of fixed process inks. The number of fixed inks used can vary depending on the press (number of printing units), products, and spot color portfolio. One option to consider is 4-color ECG printing, such as the XCMYK process (6), which can significantly improve efficiency.
Source: see reference (5)
While ECG printing offers significant benefits, it requires precise process control and stability particularly registration control. It’s a complex implementation with a special ECG color separation software as well as careful calibration, profiling and validation.
There are several strategies for transition and production of ECG printing (7). You need to collaborate with knowledgeable suppliers. Despite these hurdles, significant tangible benefits still outweigh the efforts of implementing ECG printing.
There is a recently published international standard providing guidelines and recommendations for ECG printing: ISO/TS 21328 (8). Industry organizations like Idealliance, Fogra, FTA have done a lot of work and published guidelines on ECG printing (9,10,11).
Conclusion
In essence, the integration of strategic color management practices throughout the printing value chain offers a powerful pathway towards achieving sustainability goals. By optimizing workflows, leveraging automation, and making informed design and tolerance decisions, the industry can significantly reduce waste, enhance efficiency, and minimize its environmental footprint, ultimately ensuring a more responsible and prosperous future for print.
The tactics mentioned above may not be suitable for every stakeholder or scenario in printing. However, they can be selectively used to address the challenges in meeting sustainability targets and business performance objectives.
References
1. International Color Consortium. CMYK Characterization Data. [Online]. [cited 2024 12 13. Available from: https://www.color.org/chardata/drsection1.xalter.
2. International Color Consortium. ICC Profile Registry. [Online].; 2025 [cited 2025 03 10. Available from: https://www.color.org/registry/index.xalter.
3. Idealliance. Idealliance Web site. [Online].; 2013 [cited 2024 11 05. Available from: https://idealliance.org/specifications/gracol/.
4. ChromaChecker. E-Factor Online Exercise. [Online].; 2025 [cited 2025 03 10. Available from: https://chromachecker.com/personal_ef/en/start.
5. Lankinen K. Evaluation of Expanded Gamut Printing in Flexography. PhD Thesis. Tampere University; 2021.
6. Idealliance. XCMYK Expanded Gamut. [Online].; 2017 [cited 2024 12 14. Available from: https://idealliance.org/specifications/xcmyk-expanded-gamut/.
7. Deshpande K. N-colour sepration methods for accurate reproduction of spot colours. University of the Arts London, PhD Thesis; 2015.
8. International Organization for Standardization. Graphic technology — Guidelines and recommendations for multicolour (CMYKOGV) print characterization. ISO/TS 21328:2022. ; 2022.
9. Idealliance. Expanded Color Gamut (ECG) Project. [Online].; 2021 [cited 2024 11 06. Available from: https://idealliance.org/specifications/expanded-color-gamut-ecg-project/.
10. FOGRA55. Characterization data for relevant printing condition. [Online].; 2021 [cited 2024 12 13. Available from: https://fogra.org/en/downloads/work-tools/characterisation-data.
11. Flexographic Technical Association. The Benefits of Expanded Gamut Printing: Savings, Stability, Fast Turnaround. [Online].; 2025. Available from: https://www.flexography.org/industry-news/benefits-expanded-gamut-eg-printing-savings-stability-fast-turnaround/.