SEPARATING FROM THE COMPETITION

Digital printing has transformed the decorative-printing industry. Shorter runs, faster product cycles and greater design freedom are now expected. Meanwhile, hybrid production environments – where digital and analogue printing work side-by-side – are becoming the norm.

Despite advances in printers, inks and colour management, many manufacturers still face the same challenges. These include oversized files, repetitive print-and-tweak cycles (colour match attempts), colour inconsistencies, high-cost sampling, wasted materials and prolonged lead times. 

At this stage, the printer generally perseveres and tries again. They try new ideas and fall into the trap of making ‘adjustments’. Adjustments to the printer, the settings, the raster-imaging processor (RIP) and to the file itself. Often, operators are working/colouring blind – as what is being editing on a computer monitor may not be an accurate representation of production output. 

Even if colour management is accurate, any arbitrary change to the printer or other settings will render it useless. However, this typical trial-and-error approach to ‘matching’ can be avoided through the use of specialised pre-press, colour-management and RIP solutions. Once manufacturers move away from printing flattened images and begin colour separating designs at the pre-press stage, a clear pattern emerges. The workflow becomes controlled, more efficient, accurate, repeatable. As a result, designs are more easily transferred across print technologies. 

Separation does not necessarily concern changing how a design looks. It concerns changing how efficiently and reliably it can be reproduced. 

In the world of décor, fashion and furnishings, high-quality colour separations preserve design integrity. Instead of repeatedly retouching the same image, a design is separated once. From that point on, colours become measurable, editable values. Manufacturers gain far greater control over colour, production and repeatability. At the same time, the need for re-work and re-matching is dramatically reduced. 

General-purpose image editors were designed to manipulate photographs, not to prepare artwork for industrial-print production. AVA’s surface separations tools were specifically built for decorative printing. They offer a range of multi-channel separation methods that quickly convert beautiful and highly complex designs into editable spot layers. In AVA, every workflow is completely non-destructive. It preserves the original artwork, while integrating soft proofing. This helps to ensure colour accuracy throughout the separation and printing processes.

As digital printing continues to evolve, so do separation techniques. AVA provides 18 colour-separation techniques and tools for the pre-press process. These include red, green and blue (RGB), spot, multi-channel and CMYK, all of which can be used in a single design. One of AVA’s newest features converts artwork into the CIELAB colour space before separation. This allows the lightness, green-red and blue-yellow channels to be edited independently. Introducing subtle colour play and natural colour variation becomes easy, while exceptionally smooth tonal transitions are maintained. The technique is particularly effective for woodgrains, marbles and natural stone.  It produces smooth, natural-looking spot separations, ideal for both digital and analogue print. It is also an extremely rapid and easy-to-learn process. 

Once a design has been separated, colour becomes far easier to manage. Within AVA, a single separated file can contain virtually unlimited colourways and versions. This removes the need for data-heavy duplicate images, masks and other types of file modifications. It also helps teams to manage designs and files more efficiently. Tests show that separated file data takes up significantly less disk space than an RGB image. In some cases, bloated files can be compressed by as much as 78%. In AVA, colourways always stay together in one single file without affecting file size. This makes designs, colourways and print versions easy to find, track, re-use, navigate and share with customers and colleagues. It is an approach AVA has championed for decades – separate once, endlessly colour.

One of the biggest advantages of separated workflows is that colours can be selected within the actual gamut of the target printer and substrate. Instead of choosing colours that simply look right on screen, designers and pre-press operators choose colours which they also know can be consistently reproduced.

AVA’s soft-proofing tools provide an accurate preview onscreen of how the design will print across different printers, substrates and production methods. As a result, issues can be identified before output. 

The result is:

• fewer rounds of correction
• reduced waste material
• faster approvals
• greater confidence in production
• happy customers

Michael Taut at HLF GmbH, comments, “For a modern digital-printing operation in the surfaces industry, AVA is not just a tool – it is a decisive competitive advantage in terms of colour accuracy and time-to-market.“ 

Finishing processes, such as heat, resin, coatings and surface treatments all introduce colour shifts which make the original file look different as a finished product. These changes are inevitable and generally create extra work for the pre-press and press operators in managing, predicting and allowing for these effects.

With image-based workflows, compensating for these changes usually means re-opening the artwork, retouching, saving another version and checking everything again. This process is time consuming, complex and high risk. It also brings with it the increased administration of logging and saving changes.

Separated workflows replace this complexity with precision and control. Individual layers can be adjusted independently to counter known shifts without affecting the whole design. Corrections become quicker, more controlled and significantly lower risk.

In addition, colour separations – plus a finishing simulation – accurately reflect the industrial-printing process of wet-on-wet printing plus post-print process. This also facilitates digital to analogue matching.

Flattened images offer very little control over how colours interact when overprinted. Separated files change that completely as each layer’s individual coverage can be measured and adjusted directly. 

AVA’s multi-channel workflow allows RGB, CMYK, L*a*b* and spot layers to be combined intentionally. This gives manufacturers both creative flexibility and precise control over the interaction of colours during printing.

Accurate gamut warnings allow users to see issues before costly errors occur in production and bring colours back into range before issues occur. 

As separated workflows become established, something else quietly changes – skills improve and teams become more process orientated. When teams work with separated files, less time is spent reworking artwork, troubleshooting colour or creating multiple versions of the same design. Decisions become faster, customer colour requests are quicker and easier to implement because the production outcome is more predictable.

Instead of relying on repeated print-and-tweak cycles (multiple colour-match attempts), manufacturers gain a workflow built around measurable, repeatable data.

“AVA’s surface separation tools were specifically built for decorative printing”

Moving from image-based artwork to separated designs delivers tangible production advantages:

• Less waste material
• Faster colour changes
• Smaller, more manageable files
• More predictable overprints
• Greater repeatability across print technologies
• Reduced production costs

As decorative printing continues to evolve, the competitive advantage is no longer simply having faster presses or better inks. It is having artwork that is built for production from the very beginning.

Manufacturers who continue to treat designs as flattened images, will continue to resolve problems at the (costly) print and on-press stage. Those who embrace specially developed software specific for separation-led workflows, solve them long before the first drop of ink reaches the substrate.

When using a separation-based system, the printed result will still look identical to the customer’s target. However, the workflow behind it is fundamentally more efficient. When compared to the operating costs of production machinery, material wastage and lost time, this is a ‘no brainer’ investment. As soon as the system has been installed and operators trained, the impact and savings are immediate and measurable.