The Formulation board is specifically designed to support ink formulation workflows. The central objects of these workflows are Standards, sometimes also referred to as target colors. The goal of the formulation workflow is to find a Recipe, i.e. a well-defined composition of inks (and possibly further ingredients), that is able to reproduce the Standard within a defined Tolerance and for application conditions specified in the project.
The first step in each formulation workflow is to specify the Standard. There are several different ways to do this, the easiest of which is to select an existing one from Autura’s cloud database using the Standard selection combobox. Either open it to get a list of all available Standards, or enter the name of a Standard in the selection combobox to pre-filter the list. Note that the list of Standards in the selection combobox is populated incrementally when scrolling down. In addition to the name filtering provided by the selection combobox itself, you can also narrow the selection through filtering by tags. To do so, simply select the desired tags from the Filter by Tags selection combobox. The selected tags are displayed in the top of the widget. If a tag is selected in the Filter by Tags selection combobox, only Standards containing this tag are included in the list provided by the Standard selection combobox. If multiple tags are selected, a Standard is included in this list if it contains at least one of the selected tags. If neither filtering by names nor filtering by tags is sufficient for retrieving the right Standard from the database, the database can also be searched in a more advanced way.
For this, open the horizontal ellipsis menu on top of the Standard widget, select “Search” and the “Standard Search” window appears. In addition to searching standards by name and filtering them by tags, it allows you to search by color and filter by time period. The color to search for needs to be provided by a measurement. If a measurement device is connected through Autura NEX, simply click the Measure button to trigger a measurement. The time period filter supports entering a from and a to date, thereby limiting the search results to only standards that were created in the specified time frame. Once all filters are set up, click “Search” to get a list of all standards that match the filter settings. You can now select a single standard from the list of search results and click “Select” to close the “Standard Search” window and get back to the Formulation board. You can also export the list of search results by clicking the “Export” button. You can choose between the Autura and CxF file format.
Instead of retrieving an existing standard from Autura’s cloud database, you can also create a new standard. For this, select “New” from the Standard’s horizontal ellipsis menu. The “New Standard” window provides you with different ways of creating a new standard:
- Measure. To create a new standard from a measurement, a measurement device must be connected through Autura NEX. If this is the case, click the “Measure” button to trigger a measurement that will define a new standard.
- PantoneLIVE. To create a new standard from a PantoneLIVE color definition, Autura must connect to PantoneLIVE. Either enter you Premium account details or choose to continue with basic access. Once a connection to PantoneLIVE is established, you can choose a standard from the available libraries.
- DMS
- File
- Manual