Global brand design consultancy upgrades color proofing with GMG

Elmwood has established production locations in London, New York, Singapore and Melbourne, with accurate and consistent color rendering is crucial to the company’s service to blue-chip international brands and clients such as Morrisons, Kimberly-Clark, Unilever, Anchor and Seven Seas.

Elmwood invested in GMG FlexoProof and GMG ProofControl to address its color management and output issues. GMG FlexoProof is a color proofing and calibration application designed for the specific requirements of the packaging and label printing industry. GMG ProofControl is a fast, tangible way to be assured that proofs are being produced to a measurable, predefined standard by incorporating target values from international industry standards such as ISO, PSR Gravure, SWOP and GRACoL.

Increasing color accuracy and proof-to-proof consistency has led Elmwood to begin implementing GMG-powered Epson WT7900 proofing systems across its studios worldwide.

‘Color is one of the most important elements to a brand’s strength in communication across all its assets,’ said Peter Aldous, creative services director at Elmwood. ‘Identifiable color integrity in the reproduction of these assets needs to be set at an early stage.

‘By using the powerful GMG tool we can assure the replication and quality our clients deserve. Prior to installing GMG ColorProof, one of our biggest issues was the amount of resource we needed to produce consistent color.

‘Our previous RIP/color management solution could not give us the quality that we – and our clients – expected, so there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing manually tweaking output settings to achieve the required output. What we needed was a system that could give us the quality that we wanted faster, and without as much manual intervention, day in and day out.’

‘The results have been fantastic,’ Aldous added. ‘Being able to quickly and easily work to a predefined industry standard such as Fogra and ISO 12647 has increased color accuracy and given us the confidence to produce identical proofs whether they’re needed the same day, or a year later. Using GMG technology has allowed us to implement a consistent, corporate-wide PDF standard which we can use regardless of the final print process, or print substrate.

‘We have been getting very favourable comments from our clients. One particular client has said that we’ve revolutionized their proofing phase. They’ve told us that the quality of proof that we’re producing for them is far and away the best result to portray design intent, to the point that they want us to work with them to bring their other suppliers up to the same level. We even have two specific examples where designs that would have otherwise been rejected on the basis of the perceived color quality have been approved as a direct result of being produced using GMG applications.’

Toby Burnett, managing director of GMG UK, said: ‘Elmwood’s passion in producing the best possible design and taking that all the way through to print is a perfect example of the new generation of services provider who works very closely with everyone throughout the production chain.

‘Its work in removing output inconsistencies, working to a defined industry standard and pushing their new capabilities to clients helps raise the quality of proofing not only internally, but for the industry as a whole.’

Pictured: Peter Aldous, creative services director at Elmwood, and Will Hearn, technical sales for GMG Color Ltd