I would like to clear up a couple things regarding the Meta proofing workflow....
Here is what's needed to have a successful color matching workflow with Heidelberg software:
- MetaDimension & ColorProofPro (Comes as a package)
- PrintOpen & XRite DTP41 Spectrophotometer (Comes as a package or seperate)
That's pretty much it!
Here are some more detailed descriptions of each:
ColorProofPro is used to generate a paper linearization and provides the connection to the proofer. A paper linearization calculates the amount of each ink to spray on the particular type of paper for best results.
Meta Dimension is used to apply the paper linearizations, proof icc profiles and the press icc profiles to a particular output workflow.
PrintOpen (part of Profiling Toolbox) reads the color patches in and generates icc profiles. You need a spectrophotometer to connect with PrintOpen to read the patches. The new PrintOpen has a wonderful profile analysis capability. You can compare it to any particular standard that you have set to see how far off your current reading is. PrintOpen does not do any term analysis, that is what Quality Monitor is for.
Quality Monitor uses a small group of patches (16 I think) that you can put on the press sheet or proofs of all jobs so you can build up a collection of readings. These readings can be charted and studied over a period of time within Quality Monitor. I think you can even export the results as an Excel format, not sure though.
