The nature of production with different inks, substrates and production processes means the tonal breakdown of colours can differ greatly. A solid colour can be exactly the same but as soon as that colour is printed with screened tone and production inks, its characteristics may differ greatly from that of a software’s digital breakdown.
A Tone DB is a colour file which contains the tonal breakdowns of each 100% chip and can contain an unlimited number of colours. Tone DBs can be added to at anytime, and play a vital role in AVA Production Colour Management, because when colours from a Tone BD are used to colour designs in AVA, tonal areas of the design will closely match the production prints.
- Make an alias of the ToneDB and put it in the following location: Documents > AVA > Startup Items.
- Set your substrate in AVA to the one in your ToneDB file.
- Go to AVA Menu > Settings > Overprinting and check your tonedb is selected in Production Ink Database
- Go to AVA Menu > Inspectors > Overprint and check the following settings:
- Set the Overprinting method to Reflectance 3 or 16 (usually 3).
- Set the Ink Breakdown to Production Tone DB.
- Set the Database Name to the Tonal Database you are using.
- Set the N value to that produced during the creation of the Tone DB:
When using a Tone DB you should always recolour your layers using colours from within the Tone DB colour file. Alternatively, you could use the Tone DB colour picker.
Did you know...
As the digital print accuracy of such critical information vastly relies on the substrate, inks being used and engraving method and specification, the rule of thumb is if any of the variables change then a separate tone database should be created and applied. It is possible, for example, that if the same substrate and inks are used but the engraving screen count changes, digital print results could be similar, but this type of experimentation is down to user discretion.