The Colour Matching Process

Matching colours is one of the many services we offer to our customers. We can colour match to anything you have handy such as a swatch of fabric, a Pantone colour, a Dulux paint chip, an old cushion, you name it.Colour matching can be done two ways; either by adjusting the CMYK values until we reach a match or by hueing a files colour tones until a match is reached.Where a file is editable, meaning all motifs are separate objects on separate layers, we will colour matching by adjusting the CMYK values.If a file is not editable, meaning the file has been rasterised or flattened or it is a photo then we will hue the colour tones to achieve the desired colour.Hueing isn't the most ideal method of colour matching as adjusting the hue on a rasterised file affects all of the colours in the file.Here's a run down of the colour matching process:

1. The colour requirement is identified - to get things started we choose a close colour from our colour chart
2. We print a small strike off to test the printed colour
3. The colour is checked under our D65 lightbox
4. We then tweak the CMYK values or the hue on the file
5. Following this we print another small strike off to confirm colour.Steps 3 and 4 can repeat many times until the colour is matched
6. When we think the colour is a good match visually in the lightbox we then measure the colour compared to the original with our colourspectrophotometer tool
7. The tool will tell us how close we are with a number rating, anything from 0.1 to 0.9 is considered a close match