Ranges

A colour is not printable or unprintable. It is printable here and not there, and the difference between the best and the worst condition is three quarters of this library. Ranges lets you ask the question before choosing rather than after the proof.

What a Range does

Select one and the list drops to the colours that print condition can reproduce within 2.5 ΔE₀₀. Select several and a colour must satisfy all of them — which is the question a brand owner actually has: which colours work in every process this product will use?

Why 2.5. It is the average distance between neighbouring colours in this library. A process that lands inside it puts you closer to the target than the next swatch in the book — a meaningful definition of “can reproduce it” rather than a round number.

Spot colour or process build

Ranges only matters if the colour is going to be built from process inks, so it is worth being clear about which situation you are in.

	Custom ink	Process build
How	An ink mixed to hit the colour	Screened CMYK, or CMYK plus extra primaries
Accuracy	As close as formulation allows	Limited by the gamut of the primaries
Cost	A printing unit per colour, plus the ink	No additional unit
Available in	Offset, flexo, gravure, screen	Everything, including digital and large format
Ranges applies?	No — the ink is made for the colour	Yes

Custom inks are not always available: digital and inkjet processes generally cannot use them at all, and where they can be used the extra printing unit has to earn its cost. Which is why the process question comes up on most jobs.

How much the process changes what is reachable

Condition	Of the library
Photo printer, wide gamut	100%
Adobe RGB / P3 display	92 – 95%
Coated ECG — seven colours	77%
Coated CMYK	66%
unCoated CMYK	37%
Newspaper	23%

Two things to take from that. Coated to uncoated costs 29 points — same inks, same standard, different paper. And extended gamut buys eleven points over CMYK, which is real and less than most people expect: the added orange, violet and green fill specific gaps rather than expanding everything.

All nineteen conditions with the profile behind each: Ranges: all nineteen.

Extended gamut is growing, and for an unromantic reason

More presses are running CMYK plus orange, violet and green — not only digital and large format but litho and flexo too. The driver is inventory: a fixed set of primaries means no custom ink to mix, store, reconcile and eventually discard. Managing spot inks costs real money in a way that does not appear on the job.

The consequence for a designer is that the balance between custom and process inks keeps moving toward process, and a colour chosen inside a process gamut keeps its options open.

A worked example

Open 3R2.72 and the Sample Preview shows its CMYK build: C 0, M 49, Y 24, and a round-trip ΔE₀₀ of 2.0 — inside the threshold, so it passes Coated CMYK. A colour with a round-trip of 8 does not, and the panel says so before anyone commits to it.

What a Range is not

It is a statement about a profile, not about your press. Two shops running the same standard on the same paper will differ; a profile describes a reference condition. For work that matters, profile the actual device — using your own ICC profile as a Range is a feature of the desktop application.

And 152 colours added since the figures were computed carry no score. They are shown and marked rather than counted either way.