Testimonials

About Inland Packaging

Inland Packaging is a label and packaging company based in La Crosse, WI, with packaging plants in Neenah, WI, as well as Downingtown, PA. We specialize in labels for the food and beverage markets in addition to shrink sleeves and flexible packaging. The company has over 200 employees at our multiple facilities. As the company’s Graphics Technology Manager and Color Specialist I am responsible for color and prepress automation for all of our facilities.

How did the company hear about ColorLogic?

I first learned of ColorLogic from colleagues at Bemis (now Amcor) who spoke very highly of ColorAnt, CoPrA, and ZePrA. This piqued my interest so I began to research all three products and liked what I saw. After a few trial sessions in early 2020, we began using ColorAnt (for color measurement and data optimization), CoPrA (for ICC profiling) and ZePrA XXL (for its automatic color server and ability to convert PDFs), respectively. ZePrA (now in version 9) has helped us color manage our label artwork files, including those requiring conversion of spot colors to either CMYK or ECG (multichannel) color spaces. Not only has ZePrA brought efficiency, but also vastly improved consistency, as all the profiles and settings are centralized in the server. This ensured that whoever processed a file, the result was always the same.

Gained improvements in production

ZePrA allowed us to replace our more manual approach to ECG along with general color management tasks that were mainly done in apps such as Adobe Photoshop. Among the many advantages of the XXL version of ZePrA’s color server for us:

• Fast, highest-quality conversions of CMYK, RGB, and spot colors to multichannel ECG output spaces for conventional and digital presses. ZePrA handles the most complex label designs, with transparencies, spot color gradients and blends, as well as multiple color spaces, with ease. It is more flexible and easier to use than any other solution we researched.
• DeviceLink iteration. This has been a huge advantage in digital printing, where we compare the output to the reference color and adjust it, all automatically.
• Spot color iteration. This greatly improves digital press output, whether it is CMYK or CMYK plus orange, green or violet. We can iterate entire spot libraries, even large ones, in one or two rounds, for much more accurate results.
• Full support of CxF data for spot colors. This includes embedded spectral data in PDFs.
• Full support of industry-standard ICC profiles, not proprietary file formats. This has allowed us to drop ZePrA into our existing workflows as well as exchange files with third parties without fear of incompatibilities, while simultaneously achieving high quality results.

Its potential and possibilities

I’ve only dabbled with the Multicolor Proofing feature so far, but I can see the potential. It provides features I haven’t seen in the proofing RIPs I’m familiar with: ability to process and iterate conversions from multichannel ICC color spaces, automatic creation of color bars with multiple spot channels, and verification of multicolor jobs.

I think the ColorLogic software suite is very well priced, especially compared to other company’s offerings. The ROI has been very quick, as the elimination of manual and trial-and-error tasks and batch-processing of files has saved many hours of prepress time. ZePrA provides not only great software for automating color management functions, but it also acts as a counterpoint to other systems on the market, showing what amazing results can be achieved while still staying in an open format, industry-standard environment.

– Sean Cox, Graphics Technology Manager and Color Specialist