Esko wins InterTech Award for prepress tool

Integrated software solutions provider Esko has been recognised with a 2020 InterTech Technology Award for its new prepress tool, which it says makes trapping jobs up to 70 per cent faster and more accurate.

The award recognises Esko’s efforts to continue its R&D in this area to further innovate this trapping technology with the goal to delivery the industry better tools to achieve the goal of 100 per cent first time trapping.

The InterTech Technology Awards are organised by Printing United Alliance in the US.

“We are deeply honoured to receive this recognition for the Esko Trapper, which has been received so well by our customers and the industry,” Esko product manager of graphic editing Frank Woltering said.

“Printing United Alliance is committed to advancing the graphic arts industry so to be recognised for our efforts in improving trapping to boost accuracy, productivity and efficiency makes our job worthwhile.”

Frank said trapping carried out manually can be a very complex and time consuming task requiring skilled operators.

“While existing instant trapper tools can work on strokes, images and anything within the design, it is still a manual process,” he said.

“While currently available trappers can apply standards – rules that can be configured to achieve the same trapping result using a workflow – they are not very flexible on the aesthetic, meaning operators still have to go in and make exceptions.”

Frank said this is why Esko developed this technology as it uses an ‘object-based’ and ‘colour-based’ approach. Esko created a new algorithm to make this happen.

“Often, modern packaging designs are covered in image data that is masked out by using an alpha channel. These images need to be individually prepared by the prepress professional to accomplish a good trap. But the Esko trapper is taking over this task by artificially adding image data to fill traps into the background. Combining these two improvements gives us a much better first time right when trapping the job automatically,” he said.

To learn more about this new technology, click here.

 

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