Avantika adds EFI ES-6000 with Color Profiler Suite to its arsenal

Delhi-based Avantika Printers, which has been using EFI Fiery servers and software since 2007, has recently installed an EFI ES-6000 spectrophotometer with Color Profiler Suite. The integrated colour management and measurement software for printing systems, the suite includes expert-level tools.

It works with spectrophotometers which allow printers to create, edit and maintain colour profiles. It can also successfully match colour to a colour reference, match output across multiple printers to achieve shop-wide consistency and get stunning colour and quality from any Fiery-driven printer. 

As a commercial printer, Himanshu Pandey of Avantika says, the company manufactures notebooks and diaries for corporate customers. The company also has several different new ventures for developing different products for them. In this, the EFI ES-6000 with Color Profiler Suite will be a handy tool. 

Also, the company has recently entered into the photobook segment, thanks to EFI Fiery. “The EFI comes with a new Fiery Edge profile from which we can develop photobooks for the mass segment,” Pandey says.

Colour management 
“We are known in the industry for our colour-managed jobs,” Pandey says. “When a job doesn’t get printed anywhere, it comes to us with the expectation of 100% result, and we fulfil it. We do colour management as a full operation in our workflow. We are using Fiery Color Profiler Suite for the last 18 months or so. This has become a standard in our workflow.

We do regular calibration and media profiling with the help of Color Profiler Suite. We maintain different papers, different calibration sets and different profiles for customers whenever there is a critical job. We are able to print our jobs repeatedly and consistently.”

For calibration purposes, Avantika is using ES-2000 and ES-6000 in its workflow. It does regular linearisation and calibration with ES-2000, but with the help of ES-6000, it has been able to maintain different papers.

The maximum time in which paper can be profiled and calibrated is roughly 30-45 minutes, and it is done over the network so that the operators don’t have to stand next to the calibrator. It is also able to use different modes of calibration by using ES6000 because the Fiery Color Profiler Suite helps differentiate between M0, M1 and M2 profiles.

Team Avantika: The digital team, trained by Himanshu, use the videos/tutorials available from EFI to further enhance the subject knowledge

Avantika has been adhering to G7 calibration for the last couple of months. “We are trying to convince our customers that we are shifting towards international standard. So, we are modifying our previous profiles to work as well as the G7 profiles with the Fiery server.

The current Color Profiler Suite has given us options to explore how G7 is working on the current engines and it is giving us good predictable outputs and these predictable outputs are good for the long run,” Pandey says.

Pandey is a Fiery-certified expert. “I have been trained to train people and I train my staff. I’m training them for the last one year or so, after I completed my expert training. My staff is now well-trained to use basic and some of the complex features on the Fiery.

They are now learning with the help of the webinars. The tools have been provided by EFI on its eLearning site and we are also using the best practices for PDF which they have provided for the customer over the internet,” he says.

Fiery at Avantika
The company setup comprises of three items — pre-press, digital printing presses and post-press, besides a screen printing facility. In press, it has two Canon C8000 kits with EFI Fiery servers, one Ricoh with EFI Fiery server and one Oce with Prisma 6 server. 

In post-press, Avantika has the entire unit for making the business cards, catalogues, commercials, booklets, calendars, diaries, books. “We do both soft and hardbound books. In soft bond, we do perfect binding with PUR. We also do section sewing.

We also have in-house aqueous coating to give matt finish to digital prints because our engines produce glossy prints and some customers need prints with matt finish,” Pandey says.

Avantika has been using EFI Fiery servers and software since 2007. “First we had EX 250 as the standard by which we entered into this digital printing segment. Currently, we have three EFI Fierys,” Pandey says, “EFI has further developed Fiery a lot over the years and along with it, we have also improved.”

Pandey says the Fiery server has helped the company with the colour management in most complex jobs. “We can do last minute colour correction on the Fiery by using image viewer tools. We are also using Fiery Impose and Compose,” he says.

 

Himanshu: Avantika has been using Fiery Color Profiler Suite for the last 18 years

Experience with VDP jobs  
In the Fiery Command WorkStation’s current version 6.4, there have been some new features, which, Pandey says, has helped the company a lot. “The Fiery has also helped us RIP more jobs in a shorter timeframe. We can say we have improved our productivity by 30 to 40% in the current workflow.

We also have been using Fiery VDP tools, especially the new Fiery FreeForm Create tool. This has been useful for us to maintain our customers for a longer period of time because the output which is being generated from the

FreeForm Create is only for the Fiery server. So customer can generate personalised files and send to us to print them on our Fiery server,” he adds.
The company is also using VDP for different jobs. “Take the example of a calendar in which there is a variable of several images in that same file. We now can use Fiery

FreeFrom Create to create such calendars. You can upload variable images, and text on the fly, and it also supports barcodes. We can create master file kind of VDP, in which we can RIP the masters once and push the data on Fiery to getting several calendars. We have produced 600-700 calendars in one go in one season for a particular client,” he explains.

Going ahead with Fiery
Previously, Avantika was using Fiery EX250 on its Xerox DC 250. It also bought one mono engine Xerox 4112, but that was without a Fiery server. The problem the company faced was that when we were sending the command to the machine, if there were any delays or any misconnection between the computer system and the file or the machine, it had to send the entire file again. 

Now, Pandey says, because of the Fiery server, it can do last minute changes. “We can send simplex files and if required  change them to duplex using the Fiery server. We can convert from colour to grayscale on the file itself without changing the file again and again.

The current setup of Fiery has features such as Fiery ImageViewer, in which we can preview what the output will be. We can change the colours, we can increase or decrease the saturation on the Fiery server itself; we can have a preview while changing. The

Fiery server also helps us load balance between multiple engines. We have two separate Canon C8000 production engines driven by Fiery, and we have the option of sending a file to print in one machine, but if we are running short of time, we also have the option while the job is running to change the printing to both machines.

For this, we can transfer the file from one engine to another in a jiffy using Fiery Command WorkStation,” he explains.

Large, complex and high volume jobs 
“We are using features like Fiery Compose in which we are printing one or two books in which we send the files from the customer directly to the Fiery server. Then use Fiery
Compose to do section sewing. We can also do different kinds of binding styles on to it and then create a PDF file from that and print.

We can also export files from the Fiery server as a soft proof or as a backup file to be used later,” he says.

Another feature of the Fiery server is HyperRIP, in which the larger file is divided into small chunks and that is processed on queue basis. If a job comes in last minute and has high priority, the Fiery server has the option to promote one job over the one currently running on the machine.