Matching Brand Colors on Beverage Cans for Beer and Soda Companies. Common mistakes and best practices.

Beverage Cans are becoming more and more popular. As a result Metallised substrates are a key part of the packaging sector, with many Beer and Soda Brand Owners turning to metallic materials to embellish their Brand to stand out from the competition. Metallic decoration offers a diversity of design options for ensuring the attractive aesthetic presentation of products.

Metallic packaging sets a brand apart by providing differentiation and value, which adds 'emotionalisation’, image enhancement, brand awareness, and protection. Metallic substrates offer more than just aesthetic value; however, they can be used to ensure product authenticity and prevent counterfeiting. Metallic substrates are also popular among consumers because they convey quality and offer additional strength and protection, but for printers, metallised substrates are expensive and pose a print colour control challenge.

Reflective surfaces are very different from their paper counterparts, and what works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. Today we're looking at metallised substrates and the challenges they pose to traditional methods of colour measurement. We will also explore how sphere spectrophotometers overcome these challenges to provide reliable and accurate measurements crucial for brand differentiation in a crowded marketplace.

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The three most common mistakes printers make when working with metallised substrates.

1 – Measure using a 0/45°.

Many packaging converters use 0/45° spectrophotometers to measure light, but this may not be the best choice when the packaging material consists of highly glossy and reflective surfaces. Since 0/45°s collect light at an angle of 45 degrees to where it hits the substrate, they have trouble reading a surface reflecting light in every direction. As a result, a metallised substrate will often appear black to the spectrophotometer. Ink concentration further complicates things. Since the inks used in print are largely transparent, very little light is reflected back to the instrument. This effect, of course, varies with the opacity of the ink and thus can be very difficult to predict or control. Printing a layer of white ink under the colour is one way to mitigate this effect.

2 – Simply printing white first, with little or no control, then laying ink on top.

White ink must first be applied to provide a consistent base for colour. If you don't measure the white ink before laying ink on top, mottling, pin-holing, and other defects will likely occur, leading to uneven white ink coverage, which, if undetected, can result in inconsistent measurements of the colours applied on top. You must achieve stable and uniform white ink opacity to achieve control across production runs and locations.

3 – Visual evaluation.

Visual evaluation on reflective surfaces is almost impossible. By their very nature, metallised substrates reflect light in a highly directional manner. This means that the visual appearance depends upon the angle at which you view the printed materials. If you hold the package one way, the colour may look acceptable, but if you look at it from a different angle, the colour changes. This will not be acceptable for brand owners who want consistency and high-quality packaging.

Your workflow doesn't necessarily need to change to better control colour on metallised surfaces. You just need tools better suited to reflective surfaces.

Three best practices for colour managing metallic substrates.

1 – Use sphere spectrophotometers.

Unlike a 0/45°, Spherical instruments capture all of the reflected light; the result is that the mirror effect causes no loss of reflected light. Therefore, a sphere spectrophotometer is much better suited to measuring colour on all metallised substrates since all data can be captured.

One benefit of sphere spectrophotometers' ability to measure both specular included (SPIN – which captures all the reflected light for a precise measurement of the colour) and specular excluded (SPEX – which subtracts the gloss component for results that look a little like those from a 0/45°).

2 - Establish and digitise your standards.

As with traditional ink on paper, producing colour by numbers doesn't leave room for misinterpretation. If you digitise your standards and use PantoneLIVE, you can compare them against production at all sites.

3 – Incorporate software to monitor and control process variations.

Adding software like X-Rite ColorCert or X-Rite Color iQC to your colour workflow can provide many benefits for monitoring, tracking, and correcting process fluctuations. Sometimes tolerances and thresholds are set by the customer or brand owner, or you can add your own to recognise changes in deltaE quickly.

Importance of choosing the right colour measurement instrument

Metallised substrates are a key part of the packaging sector, and they're not going away anytime soon. By using sphere spectrophotometers to measure metallised surfaces, you can not only gather consistent colour measurements and better control colour quality, but you can also acquire additional valuable metrics that will give you an even greater competitive edge.

Many companies have adopted this way of working and seen great results. X-Rite Pantone has been working closely with Coca-Cola North America (NA) and Coca-Cola Europe for years to cooperatively manage their Print Quality Program, which is based on the ColorCert Suite of tools.

Louis Jolie, Graphics and Design Director at Coca-Cola Europe, comments: "X-Rite Pantone's portfolio of digital brand colour specification, colour measurement, and print quality program solutions has allowed Coca-Cola Europe to expand packaging design execution capacity, get to market faster, reduce package-print related costs, and achieve print colour consistency the first time, every time".