What is G7 and Why Should You Care?

If you are a print buyer or graphic designer, and the term “G7″ elicits a confused “Say what?” from you … read on.
The term is new for many in the industry, and it’s often confused with “GRACoL” and “GRACoL 7.” Time to fix that! For this Tip, I interviewed Randy Allen, digital prepress manager of Concord Litho in Concord, NH. Randy served on two G7-related panels at the 10th annual PIA Color Management Conference in Arizona in December. Concord Litho earned its G7 Master Printer status last November.
MD: Randy, make believe our readers know nothing about G7. Please define it for us.
Print buyers, agencies and marketers want to be able to make things “look the same,” regardless of where or how they’re printed. G7 is an improved method for matching color across multiple devices. It’s all about calibrating printing presses and proofing systems with the goal of repeatable, consistent color and images from proof to press, press to press and even facility to facility. The G7 specification is managed by IDEAlliance, and the biggest breakthrough is its emphasis on gray balance “target values” to monitor and control color.
The ‘G’ stands for the new calibrating Gray values and the ‘7’ for the core colors in our ISO printing rainbow . . . Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y), Black (K), Red (M+Y), Green (C+Y) and Blue (C+M).
For print buyers, G7 means that if you are working with two or three firms – say one in New Hampshire, one in Chicago and one in Texas – and all of them are G7 Masters, you can be more confident that the vibrant reds and yellows in your new marketing campaign will “visually match” across all three locations, regardless of whether it’s printed heatset web offset, sheetfed, inkjet or digital … and whether it’s a point-of-purchase display, brochure, self-mailer or packaging.

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