Glossy labels are by far the most popular label media for product labeling, and for many clients, nothing is more appealing than seeing your brand on a bright shiny label.
Glossy labels do offer a unique set of challenges. Large ink pigments – in particular black ink pigments – must squeeze into the very small pores of a label surface that make up that property known as gloss. To combat this technicality, printer drivers almost universally offer a driver setting known as “Glossy Labels.” This special driver setting tells the printer to only use Cyan, Magenta and Yellow when printing, eliminating the larger pigments of black ink. The result is a faster drying label with no large black pigments to rub off.
That’s the good news. So what’s the catch? The “composite grays” of the Glossy Labels driver setting can often look anything but gray. Because the colors are mixed, the grays of the Glossy Labels driver setting can range in hue from purple to green. For this reason we don’t recommend the Glossy Labels driver setting.
Until now. NeuraLabel has recently developed a color profile that corrects the Glossy Labels setting for certain Glossy Polypropylene media. Called an ICC (International Color Consortium) profile, this file sandwiches in between the printer driver and the printer output and corrects the composite grays to a truer gray look. The correction file was created in NeuraLabel R&D and is available for download and use.
The color profile is easy to install. We recommend the following steps.
- Download the color profile from the NeuraLabel web site. It can be found by clicking the Drivers and Utilities button on the NeuraLabel 300x support page. The file name is 300XGlossyPP.icm.
- Install a copy of your printer driver, labeling it 300x GLOSSY and setting its default Media Type to Glossy Labels.
Selecting Glossy Labels Media Type
- From the Control Panel->Devices and Printers, right click on the printer icon and select the Color Management tab.
- From the Color Management tab click the Color Management button.
- On the Color Management panel that appears
- Select your printer from the Device: list
- Check the Use my settings for this device box
- Select Manual Profile selection
- Browse for the file 300xGlossyPP.icm and select it in the list.
- Click Close when done.
Selecting an ICC Profile
Once the profile has been selected for the chosen printer, all prints sent to this printer installation will use the color profile. (This will not affect other copies of the printer driver.) The purple and green hues for Glossy Labels printing will be minimized and your glossy polypropylene media will have the composite grays that now look more realistic.
NeuraLabel continues to make improvements to its printing technologies. If you would like help making a custom profile for your media and application, please contact us at info@neuralog.com.
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