Our Spot Colour Generator enables users to direct output to specific print heads. This can be useful if and when you are struggling to achieve a colour under the normal colour matching environment, especially if the colour you are trying to pick is right on the edge of your printers gamut.
Imagine you are trying to achieve a very specific blue, and you believe that by mixing the ink from your cyan and blue heads in the printer you can achieve this colour, but you are having trouble picking the colour from the AVA Multiview Picker. Our Spot Colour Generator can help.
It can also be used to mix florescent inks, special blacks, or to mix spot colours such as greens, reds, oranges and violets.
How do I use the Spot Colour Generator?
- Launch the application. The following window will open;
Eight heads will be listed, but you do not have to use them all. If you only have 6 colours in your printer, you will only use the first 6 heads, and ignore the last two. - Observe the order of your inks. This can be done by looking at the order in which the cartridges are placed.
Note: If you have created an Ink Setting, you can open the step wedge readings into the Ink Setting application and note the order in the Channels window
The numbers in the window represent percentages and are based on the linearisation of the printer. Therefore, if you select to mix up to 100% of any ink, and the ink setting (linearisation) already reduces the ink limit of that head to 93% to combat over inking, then 93% will be used.
This application sends data directly to the heads on the printer, so if you were to use all heads and put 100 % in each channel you could potentially put down 800% ink (if you have 8 heads in your printer). Therefore, you can limit the amount of ink used in the recipes by entering a maximum in the Max Ink % dialogue box at the bottom of the window.
- Set your Max Ink % relevant to your substrate.
- Choose the ink levels to mix. For example 3% to 100% of the inks you wish to mix. In this example, we will mix channels 3 and 6, which are our Cyan and Blue inks.
- Set the Steps %. This is the step increment you wish to use from each head.
- Choose a colour name and sequence. The sequence will be the number from which your colour names start.
- Click Generate. The following window will open.
- Save your colour file to a memorable place on your hard drive.
Tip: Create a folder within AVA > Documents to save your device recipes into.
The following window will appear, telling you how many recipes have been created, and how many over inking recipes have been avoided.
- Open the colour file into ColourSys. All the chips within the file will be black. This is correct.
Note: At this point, you could synthesis the colours in your colour file if you wanted to. Doing this would place an approximate colour into each chip, however we would not recommend doing this at this stage. Steps to do this are listed at the end of this article.
- Lay your colour file out in Colourbook mode.
- Spot print the colour file, and finish the print in your usual way, i.e. steam and wash, or run through the heat press. Depending on the printer you have, a finishing process may be unnecessary.
- Read the colours from your print out into a new colour file using a spectrophotometer. As you read the colours in, name the colours the same as they are called in the original colour file.
Note: You may not wish to read in all the colours from the print, as some may be too far away from the colour you are trying to achieve.
- Save the new colour file in to the same location you saved the original colour file, using a relevant name, such as BlueReadings.
Tip: Remove all irrelevant colours (those you have not read in to the new colour file) from the device values colour file.
- Go back to the Spot Colour Generator application, and click Colour File Merge.
The following window will appear, telling you to first select the ‘Colours’ which is the colour file you read in with the spectrophotometer, and then the ‘Device Values’ which is the colour file generated by the Spot Colour Generator application.
- Click OK, and open the colour file which contains the readings. A window will appear telling you how many colours have been loaded.
- Click OK. The Finder window will re-open. Select the Device Values colour file. The following window will open advising how many colours have been merged to the device recipe
- Save the new colour file in to the same location you saved the original colour file, using a relevant name.
- Open the new colour file into ColourSys and colour the relevant layers accordingly.