Automating Color Workflows
- Published: August 4, 2025
Tomorrow's Solution to Today's Print Workforce Challenges
By Marc Levine, Director of Business Development, GMG Color Americas
While there's no crystal ball for printers and packaging converters to gaze into, looking at the trends of today can help us better gauge the challenges that will affect the health of our industry into the future. One challenge that looms larger than ever, and impacts many industries around the globe, is the growing workforce shortage.
With an estimated 3.4 million fewer workers in the US print sector, compared to pre-pandemic levels, converters and printers face mounting pressure to maintain or improve color quality and consistency with significantly reduced headcount. This labor crisis comes at a particularly challenging time, as print buyers demand faster turn-arounds, more complex or intricate designs and repeatable, measured accuracy for brand color standards.
A good mantra is "success is predictable." Color is critical to customers and predictable color means predictable success. What that means for converters is that color excellence should never feel like a roll of the dice, but instead be a reliable outcome: meeting or exceeding customer expectations and printing consistently day-to-day.
Through technology, the goal is to give converters and printers supreme confidence that what prints in production matches the print-buyer expectation, no matter how complex the design may be. Especially in today's challenging labor market, this predictability becomes even more critical. When automated color management tools can deliver precise and consistent results without constant manual intervention, converters can maintain their exacting standards even with reduced staff and free up resources to generate additional value for the company.
In other words, intelligent color management can transform artwork production from a craft process that highly depends on tribal knowledge and expertise into a reliable, repeatable science-based process that can produce optimized results with fewer resources.
The Changing Face of Color Management
Traditionally, achieving precise color matches and maintaining brand standards has been highly dependent on skilled color specialists. Without science-based tools, tasks such as manual color adjustments, running test prints and fine-tuning color builds can take the most experienced professionals several hours. While this approach has helped print continue to grow for decades, it has become increasingly unsustainable as experienced color specialists retire and fewer newcomers enter the field with these specialized skills.
The solution cannot be to maintain these traditional labor-intensive processes, but to transform color workflow into a reliable, automated process. Today, modern automated color management systems can handle complex color conversions, proofing and quality control tasks with remarkable precision and consistency. This change represents more than just a simple efficiency gain — it's a grassroots transformation of business so that print operations can maintain color excellence with fewer skilled specialists and be more futureproof.
In exploring how best to automate in color management, businesses should keep in mind that modern solutions go far beyond simple color matching. Today's automated systems can perform sophisticated color analysis and prediction that previously required significant operator expertise. For instance, a spectral-based color management system can see beyond the appearance of a color and into the physical behavior of an ink, so that the system can predict how that ink will make color: when mixed with other inks and/or printed on different substrates.
This capability becomes particularly valuable in digital printing workflows, where printers need to produce accurate colors on a huge variety of substrates, but are limited to a fixed set of printing inks. A competent, automated color workflow can handle artwork conversions for different printers, on different media. It can also generate accurate proofs without stopping production, increase print uptime, and streamline the artwork preparation process. That lets print businesses take on more jobs without proportionally increasing their color management staff.
Empowering Color Specialists
Rather than replacing color specialists, automation serves as a powerful tool that amplifies their expertise. When routine color adjustments and proofing processes are automated, these skilled team members can focus on higher-level color challenges, customer consultation and process optimization. This shift allows printers to make better use of their specialists' knowledge while reducing the daily pressure of routine color matching tasks.
The advanced color management technology can also help bridge the knowledge gap as experienced color specialists retire. Automated systems can capture and standardize color management best practices, making it easier to train new operators and ensure consistency across shifts and locations. Instead of spending years mastering complex color matching techniques, new operators can quickly become productive team members, supported by both experts and reliable automated systems.
Proofing Without Press Time
One of the most significant advantages of automated color management is the ability to achieve accurate proofing without consuming precious press time. Traditional on-press proofing not only consumes valuable production time and substrate, but also requires operators to make multiple adjustments. Automated off-press proofing systems can generate highly accurate color proofs that precisely predict final print results, freeing up press time for actual production while reducing the burden on the workforce.
Automated color management is not just about color: it's about being a competitive business. Print manufacturers know that margins are shrinking, and print buyers are becoming more price and quality sensitive. For many printers, the benefits of "automation" are expected only in the area of efficiency gains. However, the financial benefits of automated color workflows extend far deeper into operations, helping organizations increase service levels and product quality, while streamlining cost.
The reality for high-performing printers and converters is that significant cost savings often do not come from sweeping large-scale changes where the cost of change is excessively high. Instead, these business experience real savings from multiple smaller optimizations that compound across their operations. Automated color management is a great example. By employing automated color workflow, printers can see multiple benefits including reduced substrate waste from color matching errors, decreased press time spent on proofs, optimized ink consumption through precise color separations and lower labor costs from automated adjustments.
When these individual savings accumulate across multiple jobs and shifts, the impact on the bottom line becomes substantial. What's more, by enabling consistent color prediction before going to press, automated systems help converters avoid costly rework and customer rejections. This predictability not only protects margins but also helps build stronger customer relationships based on reliable delivery of color-accurate products.
Creating Sustainable Color Operations
When success is predictable, converters can confidently take on new business and explore new opportunities without worrying about whether they have enough color expertise on hand to handle the workload. Imagine being more agile with your customers and having more bandwidth to explore new opportunities! Automation provides this predictability, creating a path to sustainable operations by reducing dependence on hard-to-find color specialists, while maintaining or even improving color quality standards.
For customers focused on sustainability, automated color management systems can help drive these initiatives and goals. Precise color separations from automated color management can reduce waste that results from color matching errors, eliminate on-press proofing and deliver significant cost reduction in ink use. Automated color management can also help brands and their print providers adopt new approaches, such as shifting to 7-color printing that allows spot colors to be printed in process, ganging of work to improve scheduling, and eliminating print washups to further reduce job turnaround and save having to use additional chemistry.
What Does the Future Hold?
As the printing and packaging industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, the role of automation in color management will likely expand further. Those businesses that embrace automated color workflows now are building operations where success isn't just possible — it's predictable.
Success in this transformation requires careful planning and a clear understanding of which color processes will benefit most from automation. The goal should be to create a balanced operation where automated systems handle routine color management tasks while skilled specialists focus on areas where their expertise adds the most value.
In an industry where color precision and consistency are paramount, automation in color management and proofing isn't just about addressing workforce challenges — it's about creating a robust future where excellence is the predictable outcome, never the exception.
About the Author
Marc Levine, Director of Business Development at GMG Color Americas, is a seasoned professional with over 25 years of experience in the world of color management. Marc has witnessed the evolution of printing technology first-hand, and today helps printers and converters turn color precision into a true competitive edge.
