The visualization of color choices plays an important role in many applications. A printed fan deck is a common tool for visualizing and selecting colors for painting a room, for example. While there are many similar examples, almost all involve some standard pre-defined color palette that is professionally arranged onto a fan deck and printed in large quantities for future distribution to end users. However, what happens if any of the printing parameters changes (substrate, inks) or if you have a very specific task in mind that only requires a small subset of colors? In this case, a custom printed fan deck would provide a more up-todate and efficient format for visualizing the color choices for this specific task. We developed a system for creating custom fan decks that works particularly well for visualizing colors in a multiprimary printing system. First, the set of colors to include in the fan deck is selected. This can be a challenging task when dealing with a system with more than 4 inks, as you cannot simply select an even sampling of colors in each dimension. Next, the colors are arranged in some visual order and then exported to PDF. A hue, saturation and lightness ordering of colors was employed. Finally, the fan deck is printed and finished. We prototyped our solution on an HP Indigo 7000 Digital Press loaded with HP IndiChrome Plus 7-primary inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, orange, violet and green, using both matte uncoated and glossy coated substrates.
Kok-Wei Koh, Nathan Moroney, Melanie Gottwals, Gary Dispoto, "Custom Fan Deck for Multi-Primary Visualization" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP28), 2012, pp 132 - 136, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2012.28.1.art00040_1