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For more details, visit: www.wan-ifra.org/app-support Or email: [email protected] INTRODUCTION Newspaper production standards deliver clear and MANFRED manageable guidelines for printers worldwide. Stan- WERFEL, dardisation became a great tool to create consistency across different print plants. It is a unique commu- DEPUTY CEO nication platform between print buyers, ad agencies, & EXECUTIVE prepress designers and printers. The WAN-IFRA DIRECTOR - International Newspaper Color Quality Club promotes GLOBAL EVENTS, standardized colour reproduction and is a tool in itself WAN-IFRA to implement and maintain control over reproduction processes within the value chain of newspaper colour production. The WAN-IFRA generic newspaper ICC print profile Nowadays, every two minutes people take more photos meanwhile is part of hundreds of newspaper print than in the entire 19th century. Currently, it is as- specifications all over. It is included in many software sumed that 2.5 billion people around the world use a packages that manage the digital production workflow digital camera, most of them as part of a smartphone. and pre-flight the colour data delivered by different sources. The international norms make printing and Digital colour creation has exploded with digital print buying easier and lower the costs for printers and mobile technology and this reflects on the needs of their customers by avoiding confusion and misunder- processing digital colour for publishing. News media standings. have to cope with a huge amount of data from count- less sources, which requires well organised colour In January 2015, the WAN-IFRA World Printers Fo- management and data handling. rum Board decided to intensify working in the area of print standardisation in cooperation with newspaper Advertisers create and deliver digital colour materials printers worldwide. A new version of the newspaper to many recipients like digital advertising platforms, ICC colour profile was developed and tested by the television, glossy magazines, outdoor billboards and Swedish Graphic Companies’ Federation in cooper- newspapers. Each advertising channel is based on ation with WAN-IFRA. This new version adapts the another colour display technology and hence requires modifications of ISO 12647-3:2013 especially with colour conversion to assure the best possible and best regard to reduced total ink coverage. matching results on each platform. Colour manage- ment and colour space conversion is a daily require- Also, the World Printers Forum Board decided to up- ment and inherent tool of digital and print colour date the WAN-IFRA report on “Revision of ISO 12647- reproduction systems. 3” (Special Report 2.37, 2005) accordingly. WAN-IFRA Research Manager Anand Srinivasan wrote this new Print standardisation based on agreed internation- WAN-IFRA report. al norms like ISO 12647-3 has been a great success for newspaper printing worldwide. In conjunction We present this report now to the newspaper print with the development of “full colour printing” based community in July 2015 and encourage readers to on process colours (CMYK) replacing the old spot comment and discuss questions of newspaper print colour concept in newspaper production, the first ISO standardisation on the World Printers Forum website. newspaper print standard was released in 1998 and The Online Forum has been established for the ex- improved over time. change of information for everyone interested in ques- tions of newspaper production: http://forum.wan-ifra. Newspaper printers embraced the uniform interna- org/forums/world-printers-online-forum. tional standard quickly as a matter of course since they were used to standardised and straight forward production. The implementation of the standard in real life has paid off in the years since then. ISO 12647-3:2013 3 >: IMPRINT ISO 12647-3:2013, QUALITY STANDARD FOR NEWSPAPER PRODUCTION PUBLISHED BY: WAN-IFRA Rotfeder-Ring 11 60327 Frankfurt, Germany CEO: Vincent Peyrègne DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONS: Dean Roper WORLD PRINTERS FORUM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Manfred Werfel AUTHOR: Anand Srinivasan EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE/COPY EDITING: Dean Roper, Brian Veseling, Anton Jolkovski CONTACT INFO: [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] 4 WORLD PRINTERS FORUM >: CONTENTCONTENTS: CHAPTER 1: WHY STANDARDISE? 7 CHAPTER 2: SCREEN DEFINITION & COLOUR SEPARATION 13 CHAPTER 3: PRINT PRODUCTION 19 CHAPTER 4: TONAL VALUE CURVE 25 CHAPTER 5: INTRODUCING THE NEW STANDARD 29 CHAPTER 6: QUALITY CONTROL MECHANISM 33 ISO 12647-3:2013 5 ABOUT THE WORLD PRINTERS FORUM he World Printers Forum within The World Printers Forum has also launched WAN-IFRA aims to be the central an online forum, an exchange platform for T point of the international news discussing, informing and debating all topics media print community, including printers, related to newspaper production. The Forum materials suppliers and equipment manufac- is open to everyone and is free to use. turers for the print production value chain from prepress to press, product finishing and The online forum is an ideal exchange plat- delivery. form for newspaper production experts to voice their opinion, share technical knowl- It addresses all print related questions. Its edge and learn from other experts. objective is to encourage innovation and pro- ductivity as well as product development that To join our network, go to can be instrumental for publishers to exploit future-oriented news media products. It www.wan-ifra.org/wpf promotes the power of print and the sustain- ability of print production. 6 WORLD PRINTERS FORUM CHAPTER 1 - WHY STANDARDISE? IS STANDARDISATION NECESSARY FOR A PRODUCT WITH SUCH A SHORT LIFE SPAN? ISO 12647-3:2013 7 WHY STANDARDISE? In the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in colour printing in the newspaper industry. Black and white pages are becoming rare and many newspapers worldwide have increased their colour printing capacity and print in full colour. Having all pages in colour has become a fundamental feature of newspaper printing. lobally, we see a decline in the rev- type between printing plants. This situation enues that newspapers make from meant that it was even necessary to build Gprint. Advertisement revenues are customised printing presses. However, these shrinking. Still, print accounts for 93 percent costs were willingly accepted in the hope of of newspaper revenues. Print is the unique keeping competitors at bay. That this is so is selling point of a news publisher and is still illustrated by the fact that the question “to very strong. Publishers should make the standardise or not?” is always answered in most of print. An attractive, high quality light of business interests, and not on the printed product is the key. basis of purely technical considerations. It can be argued that the lifespan of a news- Since the mid-1990s, standardisation paper is a few hours or at most a day. Why initiatives have been formed in a number is print quality important for such a short of countries. WAN-IFRA (then IFRA) alone lived product? It is true that readers do not participated directly in such projects in spot or complain about many quality errors. Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the United However, for a reader, the clarity of pictures States, South America and India. All the and advertisements are very important and aforementioned initiatives are modelled over time, the readers develop an overall along the lines of the ISO 12647-3 interna- assessment about the quality of a newspaper. tional newspaper printing standard, which On the other hand, newspaper advertisers provides minimum quality requirement for are very critical about quality errors. Unless newspaper production. a publisher provides an excellent reading and advertising experience, it is difficult to The ISO 12647-3 newspaper standard has retain them. Bad reproduction results in been in existence for 16 years. The standard loss of readers and many free “make-goods.” was first developed and introduced in 1998, Therefore, there is a tremendous pressure on when colour printing started becoming pop- newspapers to standardise. ular in newspaper industry. Every five years, ISO standards are examined for possible For a long time, there were only a few revision to introduce improvements, take standards in the graphics industry. In the into account new technical developments 19th century, it was still commonplace to and react to changed market needs. For this have different type heights for hot-metal reason, the ISO Technical Committee 130 composition. It was not possible to exchange (TC 130), which is responsible for develop- 8 WORLD PRINTERS FORUM ing graphic standards, revised the standard in 2005 FM screens are common; Improved newsprint are be- and again in late 2013.