An Investigation of the performance of gray-component replacement

Members of the graphic arts industries are slowly becoming aware of undercolor reduction techniques used in the attempt to help stabilize high speed wet printing. Undercolor removal is a color correction method which follows this line of thought as it reduces the amount of ink coverage by the process-color inks and increases ink coverage of the black printer in the darker neutral areas of a reproduction. The advantages realized by this technique are carried even further with gray-component replacement (GCR) . GCR removes the process color inks that make up a dark tone and replaces them with black ink in both neutral and color regions of a reproduction. This separation method provides technical and cost benefits to the printer. An investigation of this reproduction technique forms the basis of this research project. A comparison was made between the quality performance of gray-component replacement techniques and the traditional four-color reproduction method. It was found through visual subjective testing, while not all the tone reproduction criteria favored the traditional four-color reproduction method, color and print contrast were affected by the use of gray-component replacement