Alwan Color Expertise Launches HydraFix
Alwan Color Expertise, a world leader in color management and process control software, announced a major update of its color management suite of software.
Alwan ColorHub 8.0, its leading PDF color server, and Alwan ToolBox 4.0, its color productivity tool, have been updated to include new features and mainly HydraFix®, Alwan’s new, patented and unique spectral profiling technology.
“Digital print providers have to use a large variety of substrates, more than 100 sometimes, to address their customer’s jobs requirements” says Elie Khoury, Alwan founder and president. “The problem is that each substrate has its own physics and color rendering, and therefore requires a specific machine setup: inkcut, linearization and ICC profile. Printers end up having dozens and sometimes hundreds of substrate setups.
While supporting print providers all over the globe with our color management software and services, we noticed that implementing and maintaining substrate dependant setups cause a significant loss of production time. With some digital presses, we counted more than a hundred hours of production time lost per year and per machine for color maintenance operations.
At Alwan, we decided to address this problem and to find a way to replace a complicated and 45 minutes+ long paper setup with an easy, quick and accurate profile update. HydraFix®, our spectral profiling technology allowed us to achieve this goal and to update print device profile prior to any change of production substrate in only 2 minutes.
With HydraFix® any substrate and any paper profile can be updated prior to production by simply measuring an 84 patches chart with a spectrophotometer. Substrate profile is automatically updated and used for the color management of the job without any manual intervention.”
“This is impressive! not only it immediately worked as expected on a recent high speed inkjet press with Coated and Uncoated paper, but it worked as well on an old high speed toner press that was never able to match FOGRA data sets. With HydraFix® we matched FOGRA51 after the first profile update!”
Nicolas Houbart, ISO and Color Management Project Manager – Normaprint
“Visually, prints looked very very good. Comparing them with ISO-certified proofs of another vendor, they stood out for being more balanced and having more natural skin tones and greys, even peppers looked more natural and tasty.”
Andrea Gatti, Technical Director – MGV Color
“I wanted to test HydraFix® in a challenging situation.
I used a profile built for a UV inkjet with wallpaper substrate to color manage prints on a toner printer. Print was ?Eav 13 compared to Fogra dataset. After one HydraFix®, ?Eav dropped to 4.5. After the second HydraFix® ?Eav dropped to 2.5. Only 2 readings of a chart with less than 100 patches were enough to correct a completely wrong profile. Incredible result! WOW!”
Fabio Santoro, Color Engineer – Rekordata Srl
“I highly recommend Alwan software for all print factories. With Alwan ColorHub, it is easy to match Color standards on different print technologies (toner and ink) while reducing print costs at the same time. With HydraFix® profiles, we get amazing image tones, perfect spot colors, and smooth gradients.”
Paul Balas, Industrial Printing Technical Support – Konica Minolta
Alwan Color Expertise (www.alwancolor.com) was founded in Lyon, France, in 1997 by the current President Elie Khoury. His vision – to demonstrate how important standardizing and controlling color is throughout every stage of production – has resulted in the company becoming a world leader in standardization and color management implementation.
Today, Alwan provides software and consultancy to key players throughout the graphic arts industry, printers, publishers, software developers and hardware manufacturers.
