What Are SWOP and GRACoL and How Do They Relate to G7?

By Chuck Schonert, Idealliance Director of Research and Development, G7 Expert

At Idealliance, we take our mission seriously to educate everyone in the print and packaging supply chain in how to not only cope with change but also embrace and profit from it.

This is a basic overview of how the printing industry eventually recognized the need for uniformity and consistency as they came together to create a standard printing process, SWOP. The creation of SWOP shaped the future for some of the most widely used practices, specifications, and standards across the globe within the printing industry today.

The History of SWOP

As publications popularity grew back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, printers realized they had a disconnect between their printed material and the trade shops that produced the films and proofs. Without any real guidelines in place, such as basic densities and dot gain targets, neither side was on the same page. Concerned experts formally gathered in 1974 to create specifications that trade shops and printers could both adhere to—a common target. This meeting produced the first widely accepted printing specification, as well as the acronym SWOP, which stands for Specification for Web Offset Publications.

In 2005, SWOP merged with Idealliance, which in turn provided the resources to expand education, training, and modernization. A year later, the traditional method of measuring density and dot gain with a densitometer gave way to a more precise method of accuracy—spectrophotometry—utilizing LAB and Delta E tolerances derived from spectral data, to achieve gray balance—the basis of what we refer to today as G7. This allows printers to achieve gray balance from printing paper of varying white points, creating a near neutral appearance.