How Can Colour Consistency be Achieved in Packaging?

The first thing that we all notice about a packing is its colour. Somehow, we started to recognise the things with the colour of their packings. Colour control is an important factor of the packaging industry. With markets flooding with colour measurement devices, it becomes difficult to choose the one that is perfect for our industry and our pocket. A portable spectrophotometer is the most preferred colour measuring device in different industries. The substrate on which colour is printed strongly impacts the human perception. Also, the lighting conditions and the paper background is becoming a challenge for printing.

Testronix presents a vast range of instruments used in colour quantification and comparison. All the devices are manufactured with an aim of delivering precision and accuracy. These devices are making measurement easy for the skilled personnel and layman at the production line. Moreover, colour managers are solely relying on such devices to make colour recipes for consistency throughout the batch. 

Major Challenges

The printing industry is still lacking to give the perfect shape to the creativity of the designers. With the invasion of high-end software, the designers are creating mind blowing labels and printing materials. But sometimes it becomes difficult to get that perfect picture on the intended material. The exact coloration becomes difficult due to lack of perfect printing technologies. If somehow, you manage to get the perfect labels, the quantification devices find it hard to read them. This creates a problem in creating repetition with accuracy in different batches. Thus, highly sensitive and smart devices are needed to get things captured right.

Why are Colour measuring devices important?

The substrates impact a lot on the final print output. The texture of the material may change the appearance of the final print. Especially in corrugated boxes, the printing may get spoilt. Thus, to prepare the perfect colour recipe, it becomes important to quantify the colour first, with reference to the substrate, its texture and background colour. This is what colour management all about.

To make the things right, the printing devices are altered but the machine will not understand a human description. The operator needs to feed the numbers to get the right effect. Devices like portable spectrophotometer give the quantified forms of colour with high precision.

When we try to get multi-layered transparent printing, the labels do not appear the way we want. The reason behind is opacity of the ink. When a designer creates the print on the computer, the opacity was high. However, the inks have a low opacity which is why giving a colour overlapping effect. This might disappoint the client as final design is not as per his expectation.

In fact, on the computerised chart, you must have seen that with the change in colour choice, there is change in number appearing beneath. With visual inspection, you cannot choose the perfect colour on the chart. However, if you know the number, just feed it and you will get the desired output. This removes the colour disparity, cut down the human efforts to determine the right colour according to the texture and finish of the surface.

Different Colour measuring devices offered by Testronix

Spectrophotometer

Testronix offers 2 models of a spectrophotometer TP 800 and TP 810. It works on the principle of Spectrophotoscopy. It has an incident light, a detector and an aperture. The incident light is D65 and detector is a group of sensors fabricated from silicon. The device is capable of comparing master with the sample. It has inbuilt storage to store up to 15000 samples and 1000 standards. It is perfect to check liquid and powdered samples.

Precision Colour Device

Colorimeters are popular in the food industry. This is a smart device and comes with data storage facility. This is also capable of comparing master with the sample. Powered by a microprocessor, the device can make decisions and display results as per the observations made. It is widely used in quality control and management of printing and labelling.

Large Aperture Device

Surface with complex topography is difficult to capture by ordinary devices. For this, a large aperture is required. TP20XE has a large aperture of 20mm. It is powered by a software which makes smart and precise decisions. Due to its design, the need of immersion for accuracy has been eliminated.

Testronix offers an exhaustive range of colour measuring devices which are suitable for printing and packaging. Apart from that, they are perfect for industries like pharma, processed food, paints, coatings, textiles etc.