Matching Printed Color Images under the Influence of OBA Using a Soft Proofing System

Soft proofing is a solution for print buyers and printers who want to decrease production cost and cycle time. When print buyers are increasingly specifying brightened papers, the use of the standard printer ICC profile, e.g., SWOP 3 and GRACoL 2006, as the source color space in the ICC-based color proofing workflow, no longer suffice. This is because the proof looks yellowish in comparison to the brightened print with a bluish white point that print buyers desire. To overcome the mismatch between the soft proof and the brightened print, this research builds a number of source ICC profiles, including profiles built using the substrate-corrected colorimetric aims (SCCA), and profiles built using full dataset. By conducting psychometric tests in a soft proofing environment, the results indicate that (1) the soft proof to brightened print match depends on the source ICC profile; (2) source ICC profiles, built from a fully characterized dataset or the substrate-corrected dataset, improve color match between the soft proof and the brightened print; and (3) the degree of color match between the soft proof and the print is image-dependent