ColorGATE has announced the latest version of its RIP and colour management package Productionserver 21 and the LED version of the Rapid Spectro Cube, and has simplified colour matching in textile printing with ColorEqualizer. All three products will be available from mid-April.
Productionserver 21
ColorGATE Productionserver is a RIP and colour management solution for industrial digital printing and the graphic arts industry. The company offers special versions of the product for packaging, ceramics, décor and textile printing, where it often forms the backbone of complex printing and production processes. It has been installed more than 16,000 times and supports over 1800 different printing systems from well-known manufacturers.
Version 21 now features the latest Adobe PDF Print Engine 5.6, which keeps Productionserver compatible with the latest creative applications and PDF standards used in the printing industry. Depending on the file type and the hardware used, the processing speed has again been increased by up to 20%. Unicode support has been completed, so that file names, spot colour names and other designations can now also include international fonts and special characters.
For users who do not use ColorGATE’s Media Device Synchronization (MDS), a new ‘full gamut’ function has been introduced to make even better use of the printing system’s colour gamut. There are special enhancements for décor and ceramic printers in the Retouch Module and the Colour Correction Loop Module. In addition, many practical improvements have been implemented in the user interface, which make working with Productionserver more practical. Also, Version 21 includes support for many new digital printing systems. The ColorGATE products Proofgate and Filmgate have also been updated to Version 21.
ColorEqualizer
ColorEqualizer is a new, lean software solution that simplifies colour communication between textile designers and textile printers. It comes in two versions: ‘Design’ and ‘Production’. The starting point for colour matching is a printout of the design, produced on the creative designer’s home or departmental printer.
ColorEqualizer extracts the key colours from the design and generates a ‘Color ID’, which is passed on to the production partner or the production department together with the design. The printer uses the counterpart ColorEqualizer Production in order to capture the printed Color ID colourimetrically. Then the Color ID is printed together with the design on the production printing system. The result is also measured. If the print result differs from the original design, ColorEqualizer calculates new print data.
After three iterations at the latest, often sooner, a print result is achieved that matches the colour of the design. Because ColorEqualizer iteratively optimises the print data, the solution works with existing RIP and colour management workflows, regardless of their brand. Both ColorEqualizer Design and ColorEqualizer Production are available as subscription or as purchase licences. ColorGATE also offers licence bundles that allow textile printers to provide affiliated designers with ColorEqualizer versions.
Rapid Spectro Cube LED
The Rapid Spectro Cube LED is a unique ICC profiling solution from ColorGATE, consisting of hardware and software. It creates high-quality colour profiles from industrial print products where normal colour measuring devices fail. The Rapid Spectro Cube LED also captures particularly small, unusually shaped, structured or glossy surfaces, and it does so extremely quickly. Even complex colour targets with thousands of patches can be captured in less than a minute. The high-quality internal LED illumination ensures an exceptionally high colour rendering index (CRI). The RSC LED’s unique architecture matches the colour vision of the human eye.
The Rapid Spectro Cube LED is particularly suitable for the colour characterisation of demanding industrial print objects. Colour targets can be created flexibly with the supplied software, whereby the minimum size of the individual fields can be 1 x 1 millimetre. In this way, even the smallest objects such as bottle caps can be colour characterised and digitally printed in the best possible quality. The drawer for the measuring object can hold a maximum size of 30 x 40 x 15cm.
This means that a wide range of digitally printed products can be accommodated, from bricks to smartphone covers. If a flat print object is too large for this, the Rapid Spectro Cube LED can also be placed over the object without a drawer. In this way, any substrate size can be handled. The recommended target size is 18 x 18cm or 7 x 7 in.
The Rapid Spectro Cube LED also provides extremely consistent data, both in terms of the long-term stability of the individual instrument and the agreement of different instruments with each other.
A colour profiling solution is also included that supports linearisation, profiling (CMYK, RGB, aNyColor) and the Media Device Synchronisation (MDS) of the Productionserver. The colour profiles created with the Rapid Spectro Cube LED can be used in all ICC-based colour workflows, including those from other manufacturers.
COLORGATE
https://www.colorgate.com
