AI Color at Reprointelligence

At Reprointelligence, we work on bringing the latest technologies to the printing and media industry. We are specialists in color — and so are our technical solutions.

Reprointelligence began its investigation into what AI is, how it works, and how it can become useful for the printing and packaging industry. We researched multiple aspects of the production processes and found the best application within our existing field of competence: color.

The production process — let’s call it the reproduction process (by the way, this is where our company name is derived from) — is heavily deterministic. The production of printed products is not intended to be creative or unpredictable by nature. It is designed to reproduce the designer’s intent and chosen colors on the printed medium. No variation in production is desired, nor are major deviations from the designer’s color intentions acceptable.

So, how can the printing industry — in its standardized, predictability-focused production stages — benefit from AI?

Wrangling collected production data for management reporting is one option. Gathering data in hopes that it might help predict machine service needs is another.

But there is one field where every printer faces unique challenges: color.

The printing process, usually based on CMYK inks (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black), as well as several spot colors and finishings, can benefit significantly. In contrast to what designers and consumers see on screens — where colors are mixed using RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) and a single RGB triplet defines the intended color — CMYK offers multiple combinations to produce the same perceived color. But which one is the “best”?

The subtractive color mixing model we use in printing employs black ink (K) in addition to CMY, for several reasons:

Printing black text without registration issues
Enhancing the neutrality of CMY combinations to produce gray
Reducing total ink usage to reproduce a given color more efficiently

Different printing systems (offset, flexo, digital), combined with various substrates, ink types, and application methods, require individual selection of CMY+K combinations that suit the purpose of stable and efficient printing.

Why ICC Profiles Fall Short

This task is often managed using ICC profiles, which contain data about how device values translate to specific colors under given conditions. Though ICC profiles — especially ICC DeviceLink profiles — are powerful and widely used, they have limitations that are impossible to overcome:

ICC-based systems rely heavily on interpolation between known points in the color gamut. This interpolation occurs both during creation and application, often resulting in inaccuracies or deviations from expected output.
Users may find a desired color within the gamut of a printing system but still cannot reproduce it using ICC profiles — resulting in mismatches. This might be acceptable for one-off spot colors or logos but is problematic when multiple colors across many images are affected.
Job- or customer-specific wishes for how to handle certain color areas are difficult or impossible to achieve using ICC techniques alone. Time-consuming pre- or post-processing of image or vector data in PDFs is often required.

Current ICC-based approaches allow for only limited configuration of how CMYK combinations are defined to make a printing machine perform at its best. Certain rules and parameters exist, like black start/end, UCR, or GCR levels — a good starting point, but too limited to achieve full control over color output. At best, these allow for the best compromise — and a compromise, by definition, is not the best solution.

This is where Reprointelligence’s AI-supported color conversion systems come into play

Our core technology is called ColorControl.Ai (CCAI) — a fully capable color management system, developed completely from scratch. We did not base it on existing tools or mimic others. Instead, we recognized the need for compatibility with known standards — so CCAI supports all common controls like GCR, black curve definition, primary and secondary purity, special neutral-to-K-only mappings, and more.

But CCAI goes far beyond that.

Imagine being able to prompt your color management system like this:

“Reduce overall ink amounts to a minimum, make skin tones less sensitive to process variation, keep the gray axis rich for press control, display brand and vivid colors clean without black whenever possible, and map all visually black elements like fonts and barcodes to K-only.”

Sounds fantastic, right? Yes, you can do this manually — using a ton of expensive plugins, deep understanding, and lots of time for every single job. But CCAI can do it automatically, intelligently, and much faster — more accurately than even the most experienced prepress expert.

Your prepress and artwork professionals remain essential to define the desired set of rules. From there, the system takes over.

What makes CCAI special?

CCAI is the first intelligent, output-process-aware color management system. It not only considers color science but also the real physical and mechanical aspects of actual printing systems.

At Reprointelligence, we have decades of experience in printing and troubleshooting. We’ve taken the essence of that knowledge and trained our AI models to create a system that understands how printing works in practice — not just in theory.

How can our customers benefit from CCAI technology?

CCAI is the core engine behind the following Reprointelligence products:

RIrender
A powerful PDF-to-PDF rasterizer/flattener engine, producing pre-rendered PDF files with full intelligent color management.
CPS – Color Processing Server
A fully automated color management server that generates highly optimized, print-ready PDF files from virtually any PDF document.
RIlink
An advanced ICC DeviceLink software/service that creates DeviceLinks based on CCAI-optimized translation lookups — wrapped in standard ICC DeviceLink profiles for direct use in any standard prepress workflow.