When it comes to color assessment, where do you set your standards?
Read on about the critical color differences you didn’t know you were missing because your lighting system isn’t up to snuff.

There’s a new standard in town.

In May of 2009, the old international color viewing standard for the graphic technology and photography industries was rendered immaterial. A new, more rigorous standard was established to take its place, challenging lighting system engineers and manufacturers worldwide to optimize the accuracy of critical color assessment. This upgraded standard is the ISO 3664:2009, revised to reflect tighter quality control guidelines in order to reduce miscommunications and other errors in color reproduction.*

This change raises some questions. Read on! GTI has the answers.

* For a comprehensive explanation of the ISO 3664:2009 standard, read this:
“What is the ISO 3664:2009 International Color Viewing Standard?”

What’s new and improved?

ISO 3664:2009 includes a significant reduction in the maximum amount of deviation from the accepted standard CIE D50 energy levels for the UV range. The previous version (ISO 3664:2000) allowed for a much higher level of divergence, which was easily accomplished with little or no UV energy. This leaves an inherent aspect of natural daylight out of the color assessment process. With the advent of new light measuring instruments with the capacity to measure UV energy, lighting systems should in turn produce a spectral power distribution much closer to actual daylight, which is ultimately the ideal color assessment environment. This would have to include UV energy. This means that any viewing system that meets the new ISO standard will cast more UV energy on your print or proof.

What differences will I see in my critical color assessment?

True light: True color
The salient factor in upgrading your lighting system to meet the newest standard is this: an increase in UV light will increase the visible effects of optical brightening agents in papers and inks.

** Why you NEED new lighting solutions to get out ahead: proofing problems caused by optical brighteners.

• Your true colors. You will see improved congruity between an instrumental calculation of a color and the actual visual color appearance, including those colors absorbing UV light.

• See the light. The differences will be most visible in the paper or media and the highlights within an image.

• More than meets the eye. If you are comparing a press run which uses optically brightened recycled paper with a previous run that did not, you are likely to see a considerable difference between your products. With lighting systems up to the newest standard, these problems will be imminently more clear earlier in the color assessment process, and therefore preemptively more manageable.

• What you see is what you get. The appearance of your image under standard viewing light will be very closely matched to how it will appear in natural daylight outdoors.

How do I upgrade to meet the new standard?

Your ability to upgrade will depend on your current product design. If you are using a GTI Graphic Technology Inc. viewing system, which is already using our properly designed Graphiclite® reflectors and diffusion lenses, then here’s the good news: upgrading to the ISO 3664:2009 viewing standards is as simple as replacing your current lamps with our new D50 lamps that meet the standard. (see the images below)

However, if you are using another product brand, you will need multiple design factor replacements to your product in order to accommodate any future lamp upgrade before new D50 lamps can be effective and fully comply with the new 2009 standard. Unlike lighting systems from other companies, all of GTI‘s new Graphiclite® lamps are compatible with all of your current GTI viewing systems for your upgrading convenience.

GTI is leading the industry by being the first and only company to release a full range of new T8 and T12 lamps exceeding the ISO 3664:2009 international standards for color viewing. These new custom-engineered D50 Graphiclite® lamps are available now from GTI.

We’ve raised our standards, so that you can too.

At GTI we know how important it is to you to be able to create the perfect color environment for your proofs and prints, and how elusive the process can actually be. Our unwavering commitment to your successful color management brings you our new Graphiclite® lamps, engineered to fully meet the demands of the new ISO 3664:2009 standard.