Color Basics Archives - insights4print.ceo

The web embraces OKLch (OKLab),
when will print follow?
A better way to describe color

10/05/2025

Science evolves, based on experiences, experiments, and new insights. And that includes color science. Although the use of CIELab color description is fundamental to current color specification and reproduction, CIELab is ‘icky’, as John – […]

Strategic Insights

Is inline print quality control: a blessing?
Or is it a curse…

21/12/2024

When I first posted the measurements from my previous post on LinkedIn, I pointed out the fact that brand colors are only measured in the control strip. Which doesn’t give any guarantee that the rest […]

Strategic Insights

Is print quality control Russian roulette?

07/12/2024

There are certainly people who are inclined to say that I need to get a life: as a kind of distraction, I recently put my spectrophotometer on different spots of one single package. Who would […]

The truth about the Heinz ‘Label of Truth’

04/10/2024

The ‘Label of Truth’ from Heinz and Pantone is going around on LinkedIn again. With raving reviews. Everybody loves it! Genius! Except that it’s seriously flawed and, therefore, a big fail. Pantone should have known […]

Best Practices

Monitors: is sRGB still standard?

03/04/2024

Last year, I got a new monitor at work, a 4K monitor, nice! My regular job (the one that pays the bills) is not in the printing industry, so ‘color’ is not at the top […]

Should we ditch Lab colors and fall in love with LCh?

17/02/2024

For as long as I can remember, the primary unambiguous, device-independent way to describe, define colors is in Lab (CIELAB, L*a*b*). But even after so many decades, I still struggle to ‘feel’ the a- and […]

Strategic Insights

How broken is color?

08/04/2023

You may have seen some posts on LinkedIn about the latest Pantone guides, about issues with those guides. Many people shared pictures of differences between old and new guides, we discovered homeopathic-level ink formulations (which […]

The Google 41 shades of blue test, valued at 200 Million US$ revenue increase, is fundamentally flawed

01/02/2022

The recent Color 22 conference had an interesting speaker: dr. Terry Wu, about neuromarketing. My LinkedIn feed was full of it! And neuromarketing is an exciting topic. E.g. emotions can influence our perceptions. Knowing you […]

Best Practices

The Adobe–Pantone breakup: how brand owners, designers should deal with it

11/01/2022

Designers, brand owners, and the like have heavily relied on the Pantone libraries in Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. But the romance is over. Later this year, these libraries will no longer be included in […]

Fine art photo prints: “sRGB offers the highest quality” – No, not really…

16/08/2020

I’m disappointed, frustrated. A few weeks ago, I ordered two large format prints (100 cm wide) of images from my photobook on the lockdown in Antwerp. Both had – of course – a large number […]

Deep blues, with just 4 colors? Yes, it can be done!

05/07/2020

You may have read my previous article, on XCMYK and the business case: my ‘corona photobook’. Since the publication of that article, a lot has happened. And it’s an interesting story, and sometimes a sad […]

XCMYK vs CMYK: here’s your business case

26/04/2020

XCMYK is a rather simple method to produce an ‘expanded’ gamut with your standard printing inks on your standard, four-color printing press. You only need FM-screening, or another non-traditional screening, and a higher ink density. Although it seems an exciting technology, I recently found that it’s tough to find a printer using it. Which is a shame: there is definitely a business case for this. […]

Designing black for food packaging (not all black is designed equal…)

27/10/2019

In a previous post, I already covered the fact that not all black is designed equal. ‘Black’ can be composed in different ways when going to print. And this is becoming very relevant when designing […]

Where ICC color management can (still) go wrong: the blue to purple conversion

15/02/2019

It has been an interesting week. Tuesday my newspaper had an article on the (in)famous Yves Klein Blue. But the printed color was purple… Later this week, I noticed some images with better conversions, but […]

Best Practices

Brand colors IRL: creating better brand guides, as research shows most are flawed

16/01/2019

In case you wondered: I’m not the only one with a special interest for brand colors in real life. Recently I came across two research papers by Michael Abildgaard Pedersen from the Danish School of […]