ColorLayers
Prepress: preparing artwork for production
Prepress is everything between "the customer sent a file" and "the press started running". Most of it is repetitive, and that is the part ColorLayers takes on.
What prepress consists of
Whatever the process, preparation answers the same questions: which inks will print this, what each one is responsible for, whether there is enough resolution, whether the equipment will hold the finest parts, and what exactly goes into the file.
- Analysis. Size, resolution, transparency, how many colours are actually in the image.
- Colour reduction. How many inks are really needed for the image to still be itself.
- Separation into layers. What each ink carries, and the order they go down in.
- Production allowances. Underbase, overlaps between inks, halftoning.
- Validation. Whether the equipment will hold it — before anything is output.
- Output. Files in the formats production accepts, plus a document that explains them.
What can be automated, and what cannot
What has an unambiguous answer can be automated: assigning pixels to inks at a given tolerance, building an underbase, laying overlaps of a given width, screening at a given line count, checking against the numbers in a profile.
What is a judgement cannot: how many inks the order is worth, what to sacrifice in a difficult gradient, whether a thin line is an acceptable risk. The program shows the consequences and records the decision, but the decision is yours.
Repeatability matters more than speed
The expensive thing in prepress is not time, it is divergence: the same artwork prepared twice giving two different runs. So the assignment is deterministic and every parameter lives in a shop profile rather than in an operator’s memory.
A report goes in the archive: print order, angles, line count, profile and every decision taken. Six months later it is what answers "how was this done".
Where the line is today
ColorLayers finishes screen-printing prepress. Other processes — digital printing, cutting, packaging — need conversions the program does not have yet.
We do not publish pages for processes we do not support. If yours is one of them, say so — it changes what gets built next.
FAQ
Is this a replacement for Photoshop?
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No. Photoshop is an editor: you draw and retouch in it. ColorLayers is preparation for production: separation, production allowances and validation. Drawing stays where you were already doing it.
Can I keep several profiles?
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The profile is stored in settings and applies to the current job. If you run two meshes with different minimum lines, change the number before preparing; named profiles do not exist yet.