Coca Cola Around the globe
A sentence capable of stopping production, triggering a return, or starting a dispute between the customer, the printer, and quality control.
But before blaming the ink, the substrate, or the press, there is one question worth asking:
Are we viewing the color under the same light in which it was approved?
A sample may have been approved under controlled conditions and later evaluated under completely different lighting.
D50.
D65.
Office LED.
Fluorescent light.
Natural daylight by a window.
The printed piece may be exactly the same, yet our eyes may perceive it differently.
Even saying “5000 K” does not completely solve the problem. Two light sources with a similar color temperature can have different spectral distributions, affecting certain pigments differently.
And that is where metamerism comes in:
Two colors may appear to match under one light source and no longer match when the lighting changes.
Now imagine we are talking about a brand color.
Coca-Cola Red.
Whether it is printed in Atlanta, Buenos Aires, or Timbuktu, the objective is the same:
It must be the approved color.
That is why the industry moved long ago beyond relying only on:
“It looks right to me.”
Today, a color standard can be defined and verified instrumentally with a spectrophotometer using colorimetric values and tolerances.
And this creates a situation many people in printing have experienced:
The spectrophotometer says: PASS
The customer says: FAIL
Who is right?
Possibly both.
The instrument may confirm that the job is within the established specification, while the customer may genuinely be seeing a difference under another lighting condition.
That is why measurement and visual evaluation should not be treated as two separate worlds.
A color approval should clearly define:
what color was approved,
how it was measured,
and under what conditions it should be visually evaluated.
A light booth is not there simply to make color “look better.”
It is there to eliminate a variable.
Because approving under one condition and rejecting under another can turn a lighting difference into a production problem, a quality problem… and a financial problem.
**Maybe the color didn’t change.
The light did.**
And now the question for those who have spent years working with printing and color:
What’s your story?
Have you ever had a customer approve a color and later reject it because “it wasn’t the same anymore”?
