The Black tint texture feature of the Post-processing task is a useful tool for flexo operators for increasing the ink adherence to flexo plates by applying a fine pattern to the 100% tints, or even in the innear area of the halftone dots. These small white pixels are too small to be printed, so they will not make the tint lighter – contrarily, by making the surface of the flexo plate more granulated, more ink can be taken by the granulated surface.
To prevent the pattern to damage the sharpness of the edges of vectors or halftone dots (which at its turn could affect the halftone smoothness), the algorithm takes care that the pattern will not be applied to the edges.
Applying the pattern while detecting and avoiding the edges on gigabytes of image data is challenging though. StudioRIP did this on a decent speed, but our Indonesian dealer reported that in extreme conditions (1040×1500 mm @ 4000 dpi) the processing time can take up to 10-12 minutes.
We decided to rewrite the black tint pattern algorithm, paying more attention to the speed optimization. The result: 2-8 times faster processing, the reported job being processed in less than 3 minutes.
The speed enhancement is available from build 225.
