GMG ColorServer Provides Color-Consistent Results for Reproline Mediateam

Reproline, founded in 1991, was an early adopter of digital applications. By 1998, it had invested in its first digital printing machine, and two years later established a digital photo studio. In 2003, Reproline Mediateam was formed, with Erich and Andreas Achter as managing directors.

Reproline Mediateam specializes in the reproduction of artwork, paintings, and photographs for art books, exhibition catalogs, architectural books, and large-format posters. The prepress firm, based near Munich, sets the highest priority on the quality-related aspects of reproduction.

The company’s professional standards are epitomized by high-quality processes along with high productivity. The team also possesses detailed knowledge of digital prepress, and printing techniques and output devices — and consistent implementation of color management applications. This was important when they established a 24/5 workweek to meet the needs of a prestigious and sophisticated customer base consisting of publishers, museums, TV and film production companies, artists, agencies, and photographers.

Reproline Mediateam’s objective is to pre-produce images, artwork, and photographs as perfectly as possible for all media. Originals are either scanned using a Creo flatbed scanner, or photographed in the digital studio. The image data obtained in the media-neutral Adobe RGB format is then saved as CMYK data. Later, it’s converted to print data for various printing conditions and output devices, without significant quality loss.

Before choosing GMG (Booth 10561) ColorServer, Reproline Mediateam worked with a globally established color server, with the aim of ensuring cross-system color accuracy and reproducibility of output processes. But the consistency and user-friendliness didn’t live up to expectations, due to quality-related issues and delays in updating vendor profiles. As Andreas Achter recalls, “We checked the market, and learned about different vendors’ solutions. GMG is synonymous with consistent color management. Since we already had experience with a color server, we had clear ideas of the improvements a new system needed to offer, and the results it had to deliver.”

With GMG’s assistance, an intensive testing phase of GMG ColorServer in the daily workflow took place. One key assessment criterion was the result of the fully automated conversion — a single-step process, which converts an image from a source color space to a target space. Media-neutral CMYK data is directly adapted to a preferred target color space using a ‘DeviceLink’ profile. At Reproline, the target color space may be output for an offset or gravure printing process, including adjustment to a particular paper grade or, alternatively, digital printing output.

The GMG profile quality interested them. The adjustment to the target color spaces is very good, with consistent results when converting to output processes. “Printers, who ask us to do some rework from time to time, were immediately pleased with the newly delivered print data using GMG ColorServer,” says Andreas Achter.

Reproline Mediateam uses 22 GMG profiles, for conversion to the various output color spaces. Because of the high quality results, Reproline Mediateam has no need to tweak the profiles or develop its own profiles.

Today, GMG ColorServer lets Reproline Mediateam reproduce artwork and photographs that result in an optimum visual match to the originals on a variety of output media. This is facilitated by GMG ColorServer’s extremely user-friendly operation, which enables users to work efficiently and avoid errors — important when working under enormous time pressure. All data output at Reproline Mediateam passes through GMG ColorServer. Its reliability has had a significant impact on punctual delivery.