What Does GRACoL Mean For Your Print Projects

What is GRACoL? (Hint: regardless of the type of commercial print work you produce, it can have an effect upon your work)

Well, if you’re a graphic designer, to you it may only be a profile that you choose for your profiles. However, the significance behind “GRACoL compliance” is very crucial to how your project is printed. So what is GRACoL compliance?

Well, it’s a continuous improvement process for printers to align their proofers and presses aim towards a specific performance target called grey-balance. Grey-balance is the combination of a specified density of CMYK to create a perfect neutral grey. If a commercial printer is printing in perfect grey-balance, it would mean that regardless of the press and paper, they would achieve the neutral grey if they printed the specified densities of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. This would mean that a printer would have to continually test different paper stocks on different presses to finally achieve grey-balance (and of course paper and press performances are continually evolving).

Think of grey-balance as baking a cake. Regardless of the oven it’s baked in and the types of flour, sugar, milk, etc, the cake would always taste the same, because you had tested all of the types of ingredients and ovens and knew how they would all factor into the final outcome of the cake.

But it’s much more quantitative in the printing world. To test, we continually scan test-sheets and review the variation of expected densities and actual densities of CMYK across the entire sheet. We then tell our plate makers what plate curves will need to made to accommodate for the variation. Our proofers then output a proof that takes into consideration the stock and press it will be printing on.

What does this mean for your project?

It means that the beginning point for accurate color will be easily attained. It means that FAR less compromising on color will have to be made. It means that there is a much finer target that takes into consideration many crucial factors, so that there is a very clear understanding to predicting color accuracy. It means that as long as a file is proofed with our GRACoL profile, then we can match color more accurately.

Acme Printing continues to be one of a select group of GRACoL certified printers in the northeast (we are certified in both sheet-fed and web). Additionally, we employ a GRACoL certified expert on-site to continually test and improve the performance of our presses.

For you, the most important thing, is that GRACoL is another “piece of mind”, knowing that Acme is in the small percentage of premium-quality printers adhering to these color and quality measures.