ColorLayers for print shops

What changes day to day

• Fewer manual steps. Separation, underbase, trapping and halftoning as one sequence instead of a dozen operations in an editor.
• The same result. The same file and settings give the same output — whichever operator runs it.
• Mistakes before the film. Thin lines, small gaps and undersized dots are marked on the artwork, not discovered on the screen.
• A report per job. Print order, angles, line count and decisions — so a reprint six months later needs no archaeology.

The shop profile as the source of truth

Minimum line, gap, line count, trap width, inks per pass — these are your numbers. They are set once and applied to every job, so validation speaks about your equipment rather than about an abstract standard.

Other people’s artwork

Customers send anything: screenshots, photographs, files with no transparency, logos at 72 ppi. The program shows physical size and resolution immediately and says plainly when an image is too small for the chosen line count — which is an argument in a conversation with a customer rather than a hunch.

Customer artwork is never uploaded: all the work happens in the browser on your machine. For work under NDA that is the difference between "allowed" and "not allowed".

What it costs against the market

Separation software sells either as a subscription in the tens of dollars a month or as a desktop licence in the hundreds. Both charge for access: a shop that outputs films three times a week and a shop that outputs them daily pay the same.

Here you pay per export — from $1 each in the smallest pack down to $0.25 on the subscription. Preparing, previewing and checking cost nothing and are not limited; you pay when you take the finished files.

The practical consequence: a month with no orders costs nothing. A month with three orders costs three exports.

Several people in the shop

One account per shop, and it pays for exports rather than for seats. Preparing and checking can be done by anyone on as many machines as you like — that part is free and needs no sign-in.

The shop profile lives in the browser of whoever is using it, so it is worth setting once on each machine. Those are the numbers every job is checked against: minimum line, gap, line count, trap width.

What is left after the job

The archive carries a report beside the films: print order, angles, line count, profile and every decision taken — including the ones where a thin line was a risk somebody accepted deliberately.

Six months later, when the same customer asks for a reprint, it is the one document that answers "how was this done" — without having to find out who prepared it.

FAQ