Gravure prepress without errors

What is gravure?

Gravure is a printing technique in which an image is applied to a substrate using a metal cylinder. Contrary to flexographic or offset printing, gravure uses an engraved surface for the desired image. The image is etched into the metal cylinder.

During printing, this image carrier is immersed in fluid ink. As the image carrier rotates, ink fills the tiny cells and covers the surface of the cylinder. The surface of the cylinder is wiped, leaving the non-image area clean while the ink remains in the recessed cells.

Challenges in gravure

Just like most printing processes, printing gravure comes with its own set of challenges. Contact a gravure prepress specialist.

• Consistent high quality printing. Long print runs have to deliver highly consistent results from beginning to end. Yet, there’s a very short time-to-market.
• Dedicated prepress. To meet the rotogravure requirements, often entire designs have to be rebuild from scratch. To make this process as painless as possible, gravure prepress professionals need tools for align, clean-up, correct, separate, trap and convert their files.

• Cost effective printing. The cost of a rotogravure cylinder is high. One of the ways to print cost effective and to reduce press-setup times is to make sure a series of jobs (variants) share the same cylinders. Dedicated tools can help you identify common content across product ranges and remove redundant cylinders.

Dedicated tools for gravure prepress

How can Esko help you? Esko’s software solutions have packaging knowledge at the very core. Dedicated rotogravure functionality ensures unrivalled quality and reduces errors and costs. Contact a gravure prepress specialist.

• All prepress tools needed for pre-flighting, editing, trapping, distortion, screening, barcodes and more inside one.
  
  
• Quick generation of additional separations such as varnishes and whites.
• ArtPro directly generates gravure Tiffs for all electromechanical engraving devices. Hell, Daetwyler (Ohio) and Aabach
• Rotogravure jobs often share cylinders to reduce printing costs, guaranty printing stability and consistency. Therefore the graphics across different designs need to be made compatible. This level of editing is only possible with PackEdge, ArtPro or DeskPack.
• A dedicated gravure quality control toolkit: WYSIWYG viewer, thin parts detection, version compare, White Underprint generation…
  
• High level of integration with workflow automation, color management and proofing solutions
• CAD-Graphics integration becomes more and more important. This kind of integration reduces waste and errors.

More information about gravure prepress?

• Contact a gravure prepress specialist

• check the ArtPro (MAC), PackEdge  (PC) product pages. ArtPro and PackEdge are the most advanced packaging prepress editors. They come packed with dedicated rotogravure functionality.