AVA Production Colour Management is a method of fine tuning the print output and view on your screen to get a closer match to your production prints. This can dramatically reduce costs on proofing and can help give designers and clients a more realistic impression of how their final product will look.

Although more and more decorative print (textiles, fashion, home furnishings, flooring, wall coverings, ceramic tiles) is done digitally, total digital production will almost certainly still represent less than 10% of all decorative printed products made and sold this year.

This means that a lot of our customers have a partially digitised workflow. Initial design creation, editing, repeating, colour separation and colouring are all likely to be digital (hopefully using mainly AVA software). Many of our customers also print samples digitally. These may be simple paper ‘first look’ samples or targets or more sophisticated ‘production simulation’ samples printed digitally onto the same substrate (sometimes using the same inks) as will be used for bulk analogue (usually gravure or rotary screen) production.

Unless the customer has sufficient digital printing capacity (at the right unit costs) to satisfy bulk demand, however, the need then arises to match an analogue production print accurately to the digital sample or target. This process is not easy, particularly for complex tonal designs involving the overprinting of several spot colours. This is the process that we at AVA call Production Colour Management or PCM.

PCM is, almost by definition, unique to every customer. The chances of two unrelated businesses using exactly the same combination of substrates, inks or dyes and production processes (including printing, pre/post treatment, lamination etc) are vanishingly small. Traditionally our approach to this problem was a two tier one; first we installed and trained the customer to use all of the relevant AVA ‘standard’ software, then we worked with customer on a consultancy basis to analyse and refine production processes and procedures, harvest additional data for the software to use and create custom settings in order to further improve the speed and accuracy of digital to analogue matching.

We have launched a new intermediate (Stage 2) software product (called AVA Production Colour Management) that allows customers to create and use their own Tonal Databases (Tone DBs) and Custom Overprint Settings (COPs). This either reduces, or in some cases completely eliminates, the need for Stage Three consultancy which is inevitably more expensive (although several of our customers have reported paybacks on their investment in AVA consultancy of less than six months in terms of reduced wastage, press time and lead times) than the ‘DIY ‘approach of buying good tools (software) and then working out for yourself how best to apply those to the individual challenges faced by your business.

In summary, therefore, AVA now offers a three stage approach to the challenges of Production Colour Management:

Stage One

Customers purchase (or lease) relevant modules of the ‘standard’ AVA software, typically AVA Technical (or Quick) Separations, AVA Colour and (sometimes) an AVA RIP. Ideally we recommend that a minimum of six months would be allocated to Stage One in order to allow for two rounds of training (basic and advanced) so that customers can be sure that they are getting the optimum performance out of the standard software before progressing further.

Stage Two

Customers who are looking for further improvements in the speed and ease with which they can match analogue production to their digital targets (with consequent reduction of waste, production times and lead times), purchase and receive training in the use of the AVA Production Colour software. This allows them to create and use their own Tonal DBs and Custom Overprints - the significance of which they will already understand from their training and experience with AVA Colour.

Stage Three

Some customers who have seen enough improvement from Stages One and Two to be convinced that the AVA technology works but are striving for even better productivity, progress to the final level of PCM which is AVA Consultancy. This involves the design and agreement of a tailor-made project which will feature:

• clearly defined target outcomes and a means of measuring these
• a detailed plan of the resources (personnel and other) to be allocated to the project by a) the Customer and b) AVA
• a detailed costing of the AVA inputs to be provided
• a detailed timescale for the project

In our experience almost all decorative print manufacturers can derive some benefit from AVA Production Colour Management. Nobody is likely to reach ‘perfection’ where every single analogue print matches the digital target ‘perfectly’ first time every time. A business which produces all (or nearly all) of its products on the same substrate, with the same production process using the same inks or dyes (e.g. some flooring and laminate businesses) will be able to get much closer to such an ideal than, for example, a textile printing mill which has to handle multiple substrates and dye systems. But either/both of these businesses should be able to obtain significant improvements over current practice using AVA Production Colour Management. High wastage (substrates and inks/dyes) and low productivity (time spent on press making small adjustments by trial and error prior to running the job at full speed) are endemic in all of the decorative print industries. Increasing attention from both consumers and governments to the ecological implications of such inefficient production methods strengthens the case for improvement still further. PCM may not be able to deliver perfection (you will still have to contend with process instabilities, differences between batches of raw materials, human error etc. etc.), but it can demonstrably move the business in the right direction.