Prepress
Alwans HydraFix makes digital devices print accurate color with any substrate in only 2 minutes
Thursday 03. March 2022 - Easy and fast, HydraFix eliminates machine setup and idle time due to substrate change. 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, Alwans 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.”