ColorFlow supports the following types of measurement charts (with target functionality):
- Tint Ramp (Tonal control)
- Tonal only (Tonal control)
- P2P25 (Tonal control with gray balance)
- Full Color and Tonal (Tonal control with gray balance and color relationship management)
A measurement chart contains all color patches required to determine the color or tonal response of a printing device. It includes all necessary identification and branding information that can be printed on either a single chart form or multiple chart forms, depending on the chart type and your printing device. A chart form contains one or several measurement pages. A measurement page is the portion of a chart form that can be measured by a color measurement device. It contains a footer and color patches that are a few millimeters in width. The total number of patches in a chart form, depending on the intent of the characterization (tonal, gray balance or full-color response) and the number of process inks that are used. A full-color characterization chart for a CMYK inkset requires about 1600 patches spread over multiple measurement pages, whereas a tonal characterization chart for the same inkset requires only a small single-page tint ramp chart, potentially consisting of as few as 20 patches. The maximum size of a measurement page is limited by the measurement device and the uninterrupted printable area on the print device.
The following shows an example full-color characterization chart that consists of four measurement pages in a single chart form:
If you only want to generate tonal calibration curves, you can:
- Create a Tint Ramp chart to produce localized tonal response
- Create a Tonal only chart to produce sheet-wise tonal response of your print device
- Measure a built-in P2P25 chart which produces both tonal and gray balance response
If you want to do a full-color characterization in order to generate a device profile or DeviceLink (only available in ColorFlow Pro Workflow edition), measure a Full Color and Tonal chart.