The following is a column from the June 2026 PRINTING United Journal
Think about the last time a customer handed you a file with a vivid orange sunset, a rich emerald green logo, or a saturated violet background and asked you to match it. If you were working with a standard CMYK workflow, there’s a good chance you left some of that color on the table — not because of poor color management, but because the tools you were using couldn’t get there. That’s exactly the problem Expanded Color Gamut (ECG) printing is designed to solve.
ECG isn’t a new concept, but the technology is maturing rapidly. If you haven’t explored what it could mean for your shop, now is a great time to take a closer look.
What Exactly is ECG?
In a standard CMYK workflow, you’re working with four ink channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. As I’ve covered in past columns, those inks give you thousands of reproducible colors. Compare that to the millions of colors the average human eye can see. It becomes clear why some of those vivid oranges and deep purples are challenging to reproduce accurately.
ECG expands the color gamut of a print device by adding extra ink channels — typically orange, green, and violet (OGV) — to the standard CMYK set. Those additional inks target the areas where CMYK struggles most, particularly oranges and yellows, greens, blues, and violets. The result is a significantly wider color gamut that moves print much closer to what the human eye perceives — and much closer to what your customer expects when they hand you that file.
Why Should You Care?
Here’s where I want to be direct with you. If a significant portion of your work involves brand color reproduction — retail graphics, point-of-purchase displays, packaging, or trade show exhibits — ECG deserves your attention. Brand owners increasingly understand what modern color reproduction is capable of, and their expectations continue to rise alongside the technology.
Consider the challenge of reproducing a PANTONE spot color with a standard CMYK device. Many of those spot colors — particularly in the orange, green, and violet families — cannot be achieved with CMYK alone. The typical workaround is adding a dedicated spot ink channel (when you have that capability), which can work but adds cost and complexity. ECG approaches the problem differently. By building an expanded gamut directly into the fixed ink set, it gives you a far better chance at hitting those PANTONE targets without the overhead of a dedicated spot ink.
What Does It Take to Get There?
This is where I want to slow things down a bit, because ECG is not a “set it and forget it” solution. If you’ve been following the Color Corner series, you already know that good color management starts with the fundamentals — environmental conditions, printer calibration (or “stabilizing the system”), and a disciplined profiling process. ECG is no different; in fact, it raises the bar on all those fundamentals.
You’ll need a RIP that supports ECG workflows, and not all RIPs handle ECG equally well. You’ll want to confirm with your software manufacturer what their ECG capabilities are and where the settings are located in the software.
You’ll also need a spectrophotometer — this is non-negotiable for ECG profiling. The additional ink channels mean a significantly larger color space to characterize, and you cannot do that reliably without good spectral data.
The profiling process itself will require more patches — more data points to fill in that expanded three-dimensional color space. I talked about this concept in a Color Management Basics series I wrote for the PRINTING United Journal several years ago. The process takes a bit more time, but the payoff in color accuracy is worth the investment.
The ECG 7 Color Dataset and Profile
Here’s something you can do right now. Since 2017, the Print Properties Committee has been working on a standardized ECG color space and has completed numerous test runs. Printers can now access the PRINTING United Alliance ECG 7 Color Dataset and Profile. Designed for printers using ISO 12647-2-compliant CMYK inks, along with orange, green, and violet, the kit includes an ICC (v4) profile and dataset for use in production environments.
Download the Dataset and Profile here: ilearningplus.org/courses/printing-united-alliance-ecg-7-color-dataset-and-profile.
A Word About Workflow
One of the questions I hear most often about ECG is how it affects the file preparation side of things. The short answer is that a well-implemented ECG workflow is largely transparent to the designer. Files still come in as RGB or CMYK, and the RIP handles the conversion to the expanded gamut ink set. The key, as always, is to make sure your input profiles and rendering intents are set correctly so you take full advantage of the wider gamut rather than constraining it to a smaller color space before it even reaches your RIP.
This is a great time to revisit those color settings in your Adobe software. Remember, the default settings in Adobe — sRGB and SWOP — are not optimized for many print applications and can unnecessarily limit available color. If you are running an ECG device but your design files are still being created in sRGB, you are essentially putting a speed governor on a race car.
Is ECG Right for Your Shop?
That depends on the work you do and the customers you serve. If your work is primarily banners, simple graphics, and general signage, a well-tuned standard CMYK workflow may serve you just fine. But if you compete for brand color work, retail graphics, or any application where color accuracy is a key differentiator, ECG offers a genuine competitive advantage worth exploring.
The technology is here. The resources exist. And the customers who care about color — the ones willing to pay a premium for accuracy — are already asking what their printer can do. The question is whether you’ll be ready to answer.
Start by downloading the PRINTING United Alliance ECG 7 Color Dataset and Profile from iLEARNING+. If you want to build a solid foundation before diving into ECG, check out the “Expanded Color Gamut Printing” course at ilearningplus.org. And as always, don’t let the pace of the shop keep you from staying ahead of what’s coming.
To learn more about training, eLearning courses, and other educational opportunities available to members for free or at a discounted rate, contact 888-385-3588 / membership@printing.org.