Graphic Industry Research Articles

Impact of Illuminant Metamerism on Colour Fidelity in Graphic Reproduction of Artistic Images

The aim of the research was to to evaluate the quality of illuminant metamerism by using Colour rendering index through similar paintings and half-tone reproduction images within the graphic industry. Employing the methodology of visual perception and testing conducted by standard observers, the study scrutinises how different colour techniques of paintings respond to diverse light sources under standardised conditions. This investigation is pivotal for understanding the chromatic fidelity and consistency of paintings and their reproduction with half-tone colours, by measuring the grey balance field, for all images. To find the most suitable light source and to complete the colour quality, the Osram LED light at 3000 K, 4000 K, and 6500 K is used. The resulting index could be deceptive in cases of significant disparities. The American IES TM-30-18 colour rendering index (CRI) metric, quantifies illumination metamerism's ability to faithfully depict natural colours. At every stage (R1–R15), the average colour reproduction CRI must be more than 90.

Towards Expanding the Use of Paper Made from Recycled and Non-Woody Plants: Enhancing the Print Quality through the Application of Nano-Modified Offset Inks

This study aims to investigate the feasibility of using paper made from eco-friendly recycled and non-woody plants in graphic technology, particularly in offset printing. Instead of changing the composition or modifying the surface properties of the paper, the focus was on enhancing the print quality by modifying the printing ink. By modifying the printing inks, the quality of the prints on recycled and non-woody paper can be optimized, which in turn reduces the need for paper made from primary fibers. This approach can expand the use of alternative materials in graphic technology and design. The objective was to optimize the print quality on these sustainable materials. Five types of uncoated paper were used, with high-quality uncoated offset paper based on virgin fibers serving as a reference. Laboratory tests of the basic and surface properties were carried out to measure the paper quality parameters that are important for offset printing. The influence of the paper composition on its optical and colorimetric properties was also investigated. The interaction between the selected papers and offset inks was examined through measurements of adhesion parameters and ink transfer, i.e., the paper’s ability to accept the ink. To enhance the applicability of the investigated papers as printing substrates in the graphic industry, SiO2 and TiO2 nanoparticles were added to the offset inks. The influence of the paper composition on the colorimetric properties of the prints was also investigated. The print uniformity, as an important quality characteristic, was determined by measuring the mottling index. The research findings indicate that incorporating SiO2 and TiO2 nanoparticles into offset inks can enhance the interaction between the paper and ink, leading to improved print quality. This study provides new perspectives on the possibilities of using recycled and non-woody plant paper in offset printing without significantly compromising the quality of the print.

High‐Throughput Indirect Gravure Printing Applied to Low‐Temperature Metallization of Silicon‐Based High‐Efficiency Solar Cells

Herein, this work is dedicated to a both exotic and promising printing technique in silicon (Si) photovoltaics (PV). Indirect gravure printing is investigated as a metallization technique focusing on low‐temperature applications, such as Si heterojunction (SHJ) and perovskite Si tandem solar cells. One advantage of this rotary printing technique is that its components are very durable. From graphical industry, it is known that gravure cylinders show almost no wearing during multiple printing. Additionally, rotary printing techniques offer great throughput. Therefore, indirect gravure printing can reduce costs significantly in PV production. In this work, short process cycle times of 0.9 s cell−1 for industrial wafers (edge length of 156.75 mm) are demonstrated. Using an appropriate production platform even enables cycle times of down to 0.5 s cell−1. Busbarless SHJ half cells with non‐optimized gravure‐printed front grids reach a mean photoconversion efficiency that is (1.7 ± 0.5) %abs lower compared to screen‐printed reference samples, however, cycle time is reduced. The metal contacts exhibit a mean shading width of (65 ± 16) μm and an average height of (5 ± 1) μm. Applied to SHJ solar cells’ rear, such metallization can replace screen‐printed contacts with 0.1%abs efficiency loss only, as device simulations reveal.

Generating diverse clothed 3D human animations via a generative model

Data-driven garment animation is a current topic of interest in the computer graphics industry. Existing approaches generally establish the mapping between a single human pose or a temporal pose sequence, and garment deformation, but it is difficult to quickly generate diverse clothed human animations. We address this problem with a method to automatically synthesize dressed human animations with temporal consistency from a specified human motion label. At the heart of our method is a two-stage strategy. Specifically, we first learn a latent space encoding the sequence-level distribution of human motions utilizing a transformer-based conditional variational autoencoder (Transformer-CVAE). Then a garment simulator synthesizes dynamic garment shapes using a transformer encoder–decoder architecture. Since the learned latent space comes from varied human motions, our method can generate a variety of styles of motions given a specific motion label. By means of a novel beginning of sequence (BOS) learning strategy and a self-supervised refinement procedure, our garment simulator is capable of efficiently synthesizing garment deformation sequences corresponding to the generated human motions while maintaining temporal and spatial consistency. We verify our ideas experimentally. This is the first generative model that directly dresses human animation.

Image Super-Resolution With Content-Aware Feature Processing

Image super-resolution (SR) is currently a very active research topic with applications spanning from computer vision to videos and graphic industries. The top performers in SR field usually employ deep or wide convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to restore the lost textures from low-resolution images. However, most of these methods adopt pixel-shuffle, and deconvolution as their up-sampling techniques and often generate conspicuous artifacts in the reconstructed image. Additionally, the ongoing trend of directly portraying the degraded low-resolution image to high-resolution via complex deep CNNs improves the reconstruction performance, but at the cost of high computational complexity. In this work, we propose a multi-level bi-cubic up-sampler network (MBUp-Net) for reconstructing high-quality SR image with restricted number of parameters. A novel Content-Aware Feature Difference (CAFD) block is presented to reform the network by focusing on contextual information. The proposed CAFD block consists of four multi-level attention blocks for better extraction of low-level features at different scales. Furthermore, we design an innovative up-sampling layer that consistently outperforms the traditional up-sampling methods. These components collaboratively endow our proposed network with a great performance boost, helping it achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on five synthetic benchmark datasets, both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, a detailed ablation study has been accomplished to scrutinize the improvements obtained by different modules in the proposed method.

Ecology treatment of a real industrial effluent with chitosan: Characterization and design of coagulation-flocculation process

Coagulation-flocculation (C-F) process is frequent in treating industrial wastewater. Coagulants and flocculants are mostly inorganic, but these products can cause serious ecological problems. Chitosan (QS) is considered effective in this process and is friendly to the environment. The objective of the work was to study the treatment of a real effluent from the graphic industry using C-F with chitosan and project the design of an agitated industrial system. For effluents with low Total solid, the optimal dose of QS is near 7.81 mg/L, while for larger content of Solid, it is 31.3 to 62.5 mg/L. The pH that favours this process is between 6-7. A working temperature of 25 °C also benefits the sedimentation treatment. QS additions generate laboratory-scale solids sedimentation after 5 minutes. At 20 minutes, a significant reduction in UV-Visible absorbance is observed.

The effect of carbonyl components of printing substrates on the durability of UV thermochromic prints

Special effects on a printed product can increase consumer’s interest in a product and therefore lead to higher revenues in consumer industries. For that purpose, graphic industry introduced various technologies and materials that would have such an effect and enhance consumer-goods interaction. One of those solutions is thermochromic printing. Although bringing added value, thermochromic inks have some challenges in application due to their higher sensitivity, especially when exposed to UV light. Therefore, the goal of this work is to determine whether amount of the UV radiation during curing of UV thermochromic prints, as well as exposure after printing would degrade the thermochromic print on various substrates. UV thermochromic prints were made on three different paper printing substrates using the screen printing method and dried in a laboratory controlled unit. Synthetic paper, recycled paper containing 100 % recycled cellulose fibers and bulky voluminous paper were used as printing substrates. During the UV curing of the ink, no photooxidation of the prints occurred. Additional exposure of the prints to UV radiation (after the ink has hardened) leads to their photooxidative degradation, i.e., a change in the initial color. The obtained colour difference (ΔE) is increasing with the increase of the irradiation amount. The highest colour difference is on the synthetic paper while prints on two other substrates are more resistant to UV light. A print on synthetic paper photooxidizes the fastest due to the presence of most carbonyl groups in it. Generated free radicals promote the instability of prints on synthetic paper. Research has proven that when using synthetic paper or substrates with similar characteristics, care should be taken to accurately determine the amount of UV energy required for curing in order to prevent photodegradation of the ink. The results also show that to explain any degradation of prints, the chemical components of the paper needs to be taken into account, which is rarely done.

End-to-end Procedural Material Capture with Proxy-Free Mixed-Integer Optimization

Node-graph-based procedural materials are vital to 3D content creation within the computer graphics industry. Leveraging the expressive representation of procedural materials, artists can effortlessly generate diverse appearances by altering the graph structure or node parameters. However, manually reproducing a specific appearance is a challenging task that demands extensive domain knowledge and labor. Previous research has sought to automate this process by converting artist-created material graphs into differentiable programs and optimizing node parameters against a photographed material appearance using gradient descent. These methods involve implementing differentiable filter nodes [Shi et al. 2020] and training differentiable neural proxies for generator nodes to optimize continuous and discrete node parameters [Hu et al. 2022a] jointly. Nevertheless, Neural Proxies exhibits critical limitations, such as long training times, inaccuracies, fixed resolutions, and confined parameter ranges, which hinder their scalability towards the broad spectrum of production-grade material graphs. These constraints fundamentally stem from the absence of faithful and efficient implementations of generic noise and pattern generator nodes, both differentiable and non-differentiable. Such deficiency prevents the direct optimization of continuous and discrete generator node parameters without relying on surrogate models. We present Diffmat v2 , an improved differentiable procedural material library, along with a fully-automated, end-to-end procedural material capture framework that combines gradient-based optimization and gradient-free parameter search to match existing production-grade procedural materials against user-taken flash photos. Diffmat v2 expands the range of differentiable material graph nodes in Diffmat [Shi et al. 2020] by adding generic noise/pattern generator nodes and user-customizable per-pixel filter nodes. This allows for the complete translation and optimization of procedural materials across various categories without the need for external proprietary tools or pre-cached noise patterns. Consequently, our method can capture a considerably broader array of materials, encompassing those with highly regular or stochastic geometries. We demonstrate that our end-to-end approach yields a closer match to the target than MATch [Shi et al. 2020] and Neural Proxies [Hu et al. 2022a] when starting from initially unmatched continuous and discrete parameters.

Breve reflexão da indústria gráfica na perspectiva histórico cultural

Introdução: A história cultural da Indústria Gráfica e da Tipografia é tema motivador para este trabalho. Nesse sentido, apresenta-se, num recorte, a caracterização dos operários de oficinas tipográficas, na Europa, sob a perspectiva da História Cultural e Arqueologia da Industrialização agregadas aos Estudos Culturais em determinados aspectos. Método: adota-se a pesquisa bibliográfica seletiva aos propósitos, reunindo livros, artigos impressos e textos eletrônicos diversos. Resultados: tem-se um conteúdo que permite visualizar o ofício e a cultura dos tipógrafos ao longo dos tempos, as adequações ao desenvolvimento industrial do setor, bem como questões que induzem às preocupações com a preservação da memória sócio-histórica dessa atividade profissional. Conclusão: As estratégias criativas de sobrevivência ou de resistência no meio gráfico incluem a busca de esclarecimento formal, e há que se observar com critério esse ‘cidadão comum’ sujeito intelectual e prático da História e Memória da Indústria Gráfica.

Differentiable point process texture basis functions for inverse procedural modeling of cellular stochastic structures

To meet the growing demand of rich 3D content, the Computer Graphics industry needs tools to automatically create procedural textures and materials from image exemplars. In this paper, we focus on the inverse procedural modeling of cellular stochastic structures, i.e., spatial distributions of repetitive, possibly blending similar shapes over a planar surface, resulting from stochastic processes. Such structures are very frequent in natural textures and materials, that exhibit random spatial variations. We represent cellular stochastic structures procedurally using thresholded Point Process Texture Basis Functions (PPTBFs). Previous approaches that learn PPTBF representations of structures maps solely rely on sampled data obtained by uniformly sampling the PPTBF parameter space, and parameter prediction based on these representations fails when the exemplars are visually too far from the training datasets. For the specific class of cellular stochastic structures, we propose to overcome this limitation by introducing a Cellular PPTBF, or C-PPTBF, defined with differentiable window and feature functions. Based on this procedural model, we present a fully differentiable pipeline and optimization procedure to automatically estimate the parameters of a C-PPTBF. We show that our method is efficient (between 2 and 5 min per exemplar) and yields more robust parameter prediction than the state-of-the-art DiffProxy approach.

Graphic Design and the Role of Motion Graphics in Enriching and Promoting Tourism Advertising

Objectives: The study aims to introduce the challenges faced by the reality of designing animated illustrations in advertising for tourism promotion in the Arab world. It explores the interest in designing animated illustrations in the Arab world and the challenges it faces, while seeking positive solutions capable of advancing the design and development of animated illustrations in the region.
 Methods: This study utilizes a descriptive analytical approach, chosen for its suitability in achieving the study's objectives.
 Results: The motion graphic industry is complex, requiring careful planning and decision-making on both the economic and technical fronts. It emphasizes the significance of graphic design and its role in motion graphic design, showcasing destinations in a captivating manner that sparks the tourists' desire to experience them in person. The study identifies the various steps involved in motion graphic design, including script writing, storyboarding, graphics, animation, and the creation of scenes for designing animated illustrations in tourism advertising. Furthermore, it focuses on processing these illustrations and presenting them in their final form.
 Conclusions: The study highlights the necessity for designers to be proficient in all design programs, stay updated with their advancements, and be familiar with their utilization to accurately accomplish their work and enhance the quality of motion graphics design..

Development of an Inkjet Setup for Printing and Monitoring Microdroplets

Inkjet printing is a digitally controlled additive technology that allows the precise deposition of droplets. Because it is additive, it enables geometries usually unattainable by other technologies. Because it is digitally controlled, its output is easily modulated, even during operation. Combined with the development of functional materials and their micrometer precision, it can be applicable in a wide range of fields beyond the traditional graphic industry, such as medical diagnosis, electronics manufacturing, and the fabrication of microlenses. In this work, a solution based on open-source hardware and software was implemented instead of choosing a commercial alternative, making the most of inkjet flexibility in terms of inks, substrates, and actuation signal. First, a piezoelectric printhead from MicroFab, driven by an ArduinoDue, was mounted in a 3D printer adapted to ensure precise movement in three dimensions. Then, a monitoring system using a USB digital microscope and a computational algorithm was integrated. Both systems combined allow the printing and measurement of microdroplets by digital regulation of a unipolar signal. Finally, based on a theoretical model and a set of experimentally collected samples, the curve that relates the unipolar signal amplitude to the size of the microdroplets was estimated with an acceptable range of prediction uncertainty.

APLICACIÓN DE LA TÉCNICA LIBS EN LA DETECCIÓN DE Ti EN EFLUENTESLÍQUIDOS INDUSTRIALES

In the graphic and textile industries, liquid effluents are generated from the dyes used in the different processes. In these effluents, a heavy metal of great interest, such as Titanium (Ti), is found. This element is not currently contemplated in the environmental legal framework in Argentina, and there are no known diagnostic techniques that are responsible for its measurement. This work studied the feasibility of applying the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS)technique for detecting Ti in industrial effluents. In the assembly of samples, a possible stabilization method was established for their final disposal, considering the encapsulation in cement for construction. Based on this, four samples were assembled with Portland cement with the addition of ashes, obtained from subjecting the effluents of a graphic industry to a series of physicochemical processes. For a possible quantification process by LIBS, the thin plasma model was proposed, which established the best post-breakdown and integration times for registering the 521.04 nm line ofTi I. As the study’s final results, apost-breakdowntime was 35μs and an integration time of 300 ns. With this, it is intended to optimize the measurement parameters for the analysis and calculation of concentrations, thus promoting the use of the LIBS technique as feasible for this type of measurement.

Effects of Non-Wood Fibres in Printed Paper Substrate on Barrier and Migration Properties

Nowadays, there is a strong initiative to use recycled or biodegradable materials in all aspects of production including the graphic industry. In this study, paper was used as a material fulfilling the two of mentioned properties. Under laboratory conditions, papers were made of 70% pulp from recycled wood fibres with an addition of 30% straw pulp (wheat, barley or triticale). Considering the importance of the possibility of printing such media based on their end use, the influence of fibre type on vapour barrier properties was studied and overall migration to hydrophilic and fatty food simulants was measured. Analyses were performed on digital, flexographic, and offset prints obtained by printing laboratory papers with UV-curable black ink. It was found that prints produced using the offset technique, in which the ink remains on the surface of the paper, had lower overall levels of migration compared to other printing techniques. The paper produced appears to have the potential to be used as a secondary food packaging material.

Terrain representation using orientation

ABSTRACT A terrain data model using orientation rather than elevation permits more efficient analysis and stores its data in a multi-band raster. Representation techniques from the computer graphics industry are readily adopted with this data model. A common data model for terrain surfaces–the raster digital elevation model (DEM)–carries with it limitations by emphasizing height. Derived products such as relief shading require additional processing to determine orientation, even though they are used more frequently than those relying on elevation (e.g. hypsometric tinting). We show some of the benefits of encoding and analyzing terrain based on surface orientation, an approach that uses normal vectors stored as multi-band raster, the data storage convention in the computer graphics industry. A change in the data model and the conceptualization of the surface’s defining characteristics allows relief shading methods to run faster than conventional tools. Processing efficiencies are especially useful for more advanced shading models that may employ hundreds of relief shading calculations. In addition, an orientation-focused approach to terrain permits cartographic techniques to parallel common computer graphics methods. This project explores one such method, normal-mapping, an effect that adds texture to conventional relief shading by perturbing surface normal vectors.

Oportunidades de redução das emissões de GEE na indústria gráfica brasileira através de um plano de mitigação

Abstract The Graphics Industry has existed for many years and its operations include digital printing services, visual communication, packaging supplies and advertising materials, while being involved in the trade of goods and services worldwide. This unprecedented study presents the quantification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a printing industry in Brazil over the three years 2016, 2017 and 2018. From the results of these three years, the base year was defined as the reference for analyzing the results of a GHGs mitigation plan. The simulated Mitigation Plan foresees a potential reduction of up to 50.3 % of these emissions. The methodology follows the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The work aims to encourage the study of opportunities for a low-carbon economy and production, to improve performance in good sustainability practices in the face of environmental demands to contain the intensification of the greenhouse effect and global warming.

PENGARUH KEKUATAN EKSPOS BASYSPRINT UV-SETTER 850 DAN SUHU DEVELOPER TERHADAP UKURAN DOT PADA PLAT CETAK OFSET MEREK MANROLAND

— Current development has led to the development of technology also, including the graphics industry, one of which is the offset printing platemaking process, which used to still use conventional methods in the process using film, the development growing currently into Computer to Plate (CtP) technology is used to be more efficient, better automation, and low cost run. This also affects the quality standard of the printed plate produced, one of quality on the printing plate is the dot/raster size that is produced according to digital data. CtP uses a linear standard within a tolerance 1% of dot recovery, but there are many factors that must be controlled in achieving this linear standard, some of these factors include the strength of exposure to CtP and the temperature of the developer. So in this study is to determine the combination of variables between the strength of CtP exposure with variables 5 ms/dot, 7 ms/dot, 10 ms/dot, 12 ms/dot and developer temperature with variables 18°C, 20°C, 22°C, 24°C which has the smallest overall average dot size shift in the highlights, midtones and shadows areas. The method used in this study is to measure the dot reference using a spectroplate on each variation of the variable combination of CtP exposure strength and developer temperature. Based on the research that has been done, it can be concluded that for the variable exposure power of 5 ms/dot with a temperature of 22°C is the variation that has the lowest average dot size shift with a shift of 1.8% for the highlights area, 1.5% for the midtones area, and 1.5% for the midtones area. 0.7% for the shadows area.

MSAR-Net: Multi-scale attention based light-weight image super-resolution

Recently, single image super-resolution (SISR), aiming to preserve the lost structural and textural information from the input low resolution image, has witnessed huge demand from the videos and graphics industries. The exceptional success of convolution neural networks (CNNs), has absolutely revolutionized the field of SISR. However, for most of the CNN-based SISR methods, excessive memory consumption in terms of parameters and flops, hinders their application in low-computing power devices. Moreover, different state-of-the-art SR methods collect different features, by treating all the pixels contributing equally to the performance of the network. In this paper, we take into consideration both the performance and the reconstruction efficiency, and propose a Light-weight multi-scale attention residual network (MSAR-Net) for SISR. The proposed MSAR-Net consists of stack of multi-scale attention residual (MSAR) blocks for feature refinement, and an up and down-sampling projection (UDP) block for edge refinement of the extracted multi-scale features. These blocks are capable of effectively exploiting the multi-scale edge information, without increasing the number of parameters. Specially, we design our network in progressive fashion, for substituting the large scale factors (× 4) combinations, with small scale factor (×2) combinations, and thus gradually exploit the hierarchical information. In parallel, for modulation of multi-scale features in global and local manners, channel and spatial attention in MSAR block is being used. Visual results and quantitative metrics of PSNR and SSIM exhibit the accuracy of the proposed approach on synthetic benchmark super-resolution datasets. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach outperforms the other existing methods for SISR in terms of memory footprint, inference time and visual quality.

Explaining the business case for environmental management practices in SMEs: The role of organisational capabilities for environmental communication

The preservation of the natural environment demands engagement of small and medium-sized enterprises in terms of the rethinking of their operations and aligns their efforts with the implementation of environmental management practices by the development of organisational capabilities for environmental communication. By performing Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling using data from 112 Danish small firms in the printing and graphic industry, the study suggests that environmental management practices can boost competitive advantage in terms of lower costs and improved reputation following from the development of organisational capabilities for environmental communication. Thus, the study provides some insight in regard to the strategic significance of environmental management practices and the related communication mechanisms among small firms.

Justifying environmental sustainability in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises: An analysis of complementary assets in the printing industry

AbstractContrary to large enterprises, the environmental impact from small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) has not, to the same extent, attracted stakeholder attention and engagement. A similar lack of attention seems to have dominated management scholars who seem to have predominantly focused on the competitive implications of environmental sustainability of large enterprises. To fill up some of that gap, this study draws on the resource‐based view of the firm and the innovation‐value‐capturing‐framework to identify and characterise complementary assets utilised to materialise the competitive advantage of environmental management practices (EMP) in SMEs. Based on a multifirm case study among Danish SMEs in the printing and graphic industry, we demonstrate why and how SMEs' strategic involvement in EMP can be justified. This research complements existing insights in the field by exposing how SMEs operating under conditions of weak appropriability can justify investment in EMP thus highlighting their role in pursuing corporate sustainability.