This picker is our recommended way of selecting colours in AVA, because it limits the previewed colours to the colour gamut of your printer, monitor or both. You can also limit the displayed gamut to an ICC profile.  This is an ideal way of restricting the visible gamut to that of your final production gamut.

Set this as your preferred picker by going to the Coloursys Menu > Settings > Colour Picker. Click on AVA Multiview Picker. A tick will now be displayed beside this option and this will be the picker which opens when Option clicking on any colour block in AVA, or when selecting Colour Menu > Pick in Coloursys.

Entering Lab and Lch values

Lab and Lch colours can be entered directly into the picker, and small adjustments can be made by using the small nudge arrows to the side of each value.

Adjusting the lightness, saturation and hue of a colour

Lightness, saturation and hue can be altered using the horizontal sliders.

If you want to make tiny colour adjustments whilst in this window, hold down the option key as you drag the colour selector around the gamut.  There is a hint at the bottom of the window reminding you of this.

Applying a transparency to a chosen colour

You can also set a transparency for any colour selected.

When a transparency has been applied to a colour from the Multiview Picker and added to a layer in the Layer Palette, we recommend saving this colour in a colour file. To do this, drag the colour from the Layer Palette to a colour file. Save the colour file. Saving colours to a colour file ensures that the exact colour can be used again in different colourways and designs.

Customising how the gamut is viewed in the picker

Click on the View icons to change how your chosen colour space is displayed in the picker.

Specifying which gamut to select colours from

Select which gamut you wish to view.  This can be your monitor or printer profile (set in the AVA CMS Controller), or the gamut of an ICC Profile from your production.

In the snapshot above, both the Printer and ICC Profile options are ticked. This means the colour space is now restricted to colours achievable by both the digital printer and production (whether on an analogue or a different digital printer).  If only the ICC Profile option was ticked, it would be very easy to select colours within the production gamut, but outside gamut of the digital printer. This would cause problems if you are trying to match digital sample prints to production (whether on an analogue or a different digital printer).

Setting the Delta E (dE) of your gamut

The dE slider bar in the picker window determines the accuracy of the displayed gamut. If you set this to 0.1, only the colour chips measured from the profile will be displayed, with a very small tolerance added. Any holes in the gamut will represent areas of the gamut where a measurement has not been made and our sophisticated algorithm will be used to calculate any colours selected within these blank areas.

The dE slider can be adjusted to produce a nicer looking gamut. We recommend setting this to between 1 and 3. As you increase the slider, the accuracy of the colours shown will decrease. If you set the slider to 10, the maximum it can be set to, it will make your gamut look larger but the displayed gamut will be much less accurate because you have increased the tolerance around the measured chips.

The Compare function allows you to examine any colour changes made live on screen by temporarily showing the original, allowing you to more easily work on those tiny, delicate colour adjustments.

Restrict picked colours to a colour file

Many users find a colour picker the easiest way to search for colours. However, sometimes you need to restrict the colours you pick to a particular colour file.  This may be a colour file of the latest trend colours, or colours specified by a customer.  To do this using the Multiview Picker, follow the steps below:

1. Hold down ⌥ (option key) and click on the colour you wish to change to open the picker.
2. Hold down ^ (control key) as you change the colour within the picker. This will link the colour you are selecting to the closest colour in your active colour file.  If you have your Layer Palette set to show colour names, you will see the colour name change as you move around the picker.

When the AVA RGB picker is open, you can use the HSL, CMY or RGB sliders to pick new colours. Two colour chips display the original and new colour in the top left of the window. The whole window can be resized, giving you a larger area to pick colours from.

The AVA RGB Picker remembers automatically the last mode (HSL, CMY or RGB) used when selecting a colour so the slider bars always work the way you want them to.

To allow compatibility with other software programmes, you can choose the range of numbers used to represent the RGB values. This option is situated on the right of the RGB value fields.

The range offers three options:

• 100 - this option will display the values from 0 to 100. This format is similar to the one used in the Apple®RGB picker
• 255 - this option will display the values from 0 to 255. This format is similar to the one used in the Adobe® Photoshop®™ picker
• 65535 - this option will display the values from 0 to 65535. This format is the standard range used in the AVA RGB picker

When the CMYK picker is selected, you can pick colours using CMYK slider bars, or by typing percentages.

Using the CMYK Picker

Go to the ColourSys application menu > Setting > Colour Picker and choose CMYK.  Now when you bring up a picker from AVA it will show the CMYK picker.

You can choose which profile your picker is using by clicking the Open button next to the ICC profile name at the top of the picker window.  This can be actually be an RGB, CMYK or N-channel profile, the sliders will change depending on which type of profile you open.

Your chosen profile will then be shown at the top of the picker window.

Using the percentages dialogue boxes, you can manually enter your own percentages for each colour. 

Nudge arrows beside each slider enable you to refine a colour by very small amounts and as with most slider bars within AVA, if you hold the ⌥ (option key) key while using the sliders it give you a finer adjustment. 

If you wish to move a number of sliders at the same time, you can hold down the Shift key, click to move one slider and the others will move proportional.

If you wish to reset all sliders to 0%, simply click the Zero button at the bottom of the window.

Compare Button

• The CMYK Picker now has a compare button so you can visually compare your colour changes before setting the final colour. 
  
  

Setting Transparency

• You can now set the individual colour transparency using the CMYK picker. Tick the Transparency option and use the slider bar to determine the correct value. 
  
  

Gamut Warnings

• Both the current and original chip will now show gamut warnings. 
  

Using the Multiview Picker within the CMYK Picker Window

An alternative way to manually adjusting the sliders is to open the Multiview Picker from within the CMYK Picker to select your chosen colour, the sliders adapting automatically to display the corresponding values. This allows for more flexibility when creating colours and ease when making small adjustments.

To access the Multiview Picker from the CMYK Picker, simply hold down ⌥ (option key) and click on the large colour chip on the right side of the window. You can now make adjustments using the Hue, Saturation and Lightness sliders.

 

This picker works in conjunction with AVA Production Colour Management (PCM) software. It produces a simulation of how the base inks in a digital printer would overprint to produce the chosen colour. 

Setting up the Custom Overprint Picker

• Overprint Method - select the relevant overprint method
• Tone DB - select the tonal database which accompanies your chosen overprint method

The inks used during the creation of your custom overprint will appear as colour blocks in the picker.

How to use the Custom Overprint Picker

Once the picker has been set up with the relevant overprint method and tonal database, you can recolour designs.

1. Hold ⌥ (option key) and click on you colour chip to open the picker in ColourSys. Each colour will start with its value set to 0.
2. Begin adjusting the sliders to create a colour as close to the original as possible. The original colour is shown in the top right hand side of the picker. To its right, the new colour is previewed.
3. Once you have started to create the colour, click the ‘Solve’ button in the middle of the window on the right hand side to find the closest colour achievable with your inks.
   
   

Strengthen or weaken a colour using the Custom Overprint Picker

If you wish to strengthen a colour, adjust all the relevant sliders simultaneously by holding down ⌥ (option key) as you increase one of the colours.

The same method can be applied for weakening a colour. Simply hold down ⌥ (option key) as you move one of the sliders to the left.

Adjusting the amount of black ink used in the Custom Overprint Picker

In some CMYK separations, it is preferable to use CMY to make black instead of using the black ink itself, which can cause unwanted dither in prints.

If you mix a colour which has a lot of black ink in, you can remix the colour to automatically reduce the black levels at the same time as increasing the CMY values by holding down ⇧ (shift key) as you reduce the black slider.

The picture below shows how the software has solved the original colour using the cyan, magenta and yellow inks from a digital printer.

Holding down the ⇧ (shift key) and reducing the level of black used to 0% has automatically increased the levels of cyan, magenta and yellow, resulting in a similar, alternative colour.

You can reset the sliders to 0% at any time using the Zero button (0) at the bottom of the window.