Calibrator

Fiery-driven presses and printers come in different flavors: laser or inkjet; monochrome or CMYK or extended gamut, with or without specialty inks. Calibrator is designed to address the different calibration needs of each technology.

Command WorkStation and Fiery Color Profiler Suite will automatically launch the Calibrator version best suited to your system. Calibrator will self-configure to adapt to the connected Fiery server. Not every press requires every feature. For example, most laser printers do not need to limit the amount of toner for individual colorants, while inkjet presses do, because ink absorption by various substrates typically varies much more with inks than with toners.

Most Fiery-driven monochrome and CMYK presses are calibrated using density measurements. CMYK+ are typically calibrated using L*a*b* measurements.

With Calibrator, you can create a new calibration setting on a Fiery server or update an existing one.

Like Calibrator in Command WorkStation, Calibrator in Fiery Color Profiler Suite can create a new calibration setting and recalibrate an existing one, but with support for a variety of measurement instruments not available in Command WorkStation.

The two main functions of Calibrator are:

Recalibrate - updates a calibration with fresh measurements. The output of many presses will vary over time. For the Fiery server to compensate for such fluctuations, its correction tables need to be updated with fresh measurements.
Create calibration - creates a new calibration, and if Fiery Color Profiler Suite is installed and licensed, a new profile. This task is needed when none of the existing calibration delivers acceptable output for a specific printing condition (combination of ink set, halftone, substrate, etc.). Examples are poor gradations or bad ink adherence. A new calibration will most frequently require a new profile, for color management to deliver accurate color.

Two administrative functions are accessible from two icons at the bottom left of the window. These settings are specific to and saved in each individual Fiery server. Because they affect every user, these functions are available only when logged as a Fiery administrator from Command WorkStation:

Calibrator Settings - is used to set preferences for individual presses. This is where you can set pre- and post- calibration settings available with some press models. All models also offer to warn or even prevent jobs from printing when their applicable calibrations have not been recalibrated within a time frame the administrator specified.
Calibration Manager - is used to view calibrations available in a Fiery server, see when they were last updated, their measurements and properties. User-added calibrations can be deleted, and their names modified.

Calibrator for the connected Fiery server is available for the following workflows. With conventional CMYK products and calibration sets, Calibrator 3 will automatically select the Density-based calibration workflow. Calibrator 3 will follow the L*a*b*-based calibration workflow whenever imposed by an expanded ink set.