This technology is the future of colour management, said Alwan managing director Elie Khoury. Its about standardising and optimising CMYK data transfer.

The software analyses colour separations and then remaps the CMYK values to ones that are more printable, while retaining the colour accuracy. It can take a file that has total ink weights in excess of the printer or publishers specification and remap them to be within specification.

According to US research the biggest printability problem is total ink coverage and its a problem that doesnt show up on hard copy proofs, said Khoury.

Printers can use the software to further reduce ink weights to cut ink consumption. You can choose the degree of ink reduction by specifying the deviation from the original colours in terms of a delta E value, allowing printers to chose whether to maintain absolute colour fidelity or cut costs.

The icing on the cake is we can rebuild separations to use 30% less ink, he said. The Mirror Group used a predecessor of CMYK Optimizer and saved 400,000 in ink costs.

Alwan Colour is promoting the technology to printers and repro houses where it can be used to ensure supplied ads conform to a magazines specification, reducing the problems on press matching advertising and editorial pages.

CMYK Optimizer is spot on, said Simon Berg group operations director of Colour Systems, which is the first UK firm to use the software on Jaguar, Rally XS and Readers Digest.

Alwan Colour is currently looking for a UK printer to beta test the software that starts from 6,668 (9,990).

Contact: www.alwancolor. com, 00 33 472 160882


Story by Barney Cox