Elpical unveils public beta of Claro Layout

By Elpical: Today Dutch Company Elpical announced the public beta release of the new Claro Layout, an addition to its product line of automated image enhancement and image management solutions. Claro Layout is an Adobe InDesign plug-in and offers hands-off quality analysis and image enhancement to InDesign users.

Professionals working with Adobe InDesign now get access to Elpical’s Claro technology for optimizing images inside their documents, without leaving their trusted environment.

Claro Layout allows InDesign users to focus on the creative work and the layout of a document without having to worry about image quality first. They can simply use the original RGB image for designing the document and only when the layout is ready, use Claro Layout to optimize and convert the images to CMYK, without leaving InDesign.

Claro Layout, based on Claro Individual Image Analysis, first automatically and individually analyzes each image and then enhances each image inside the InDesign document according to its particular requirements, as well as applying the desired crop, resolution and color space. This allows the image to be optimized directly in the desired size, offering timesaving and great flexibility in layout.

Work with light files
Images in documents can dramatically increase the size of your file. Normally, after a picture has been cropped or resized, the ‘unwanted’ parts remain and the complete picture is stored. Claro Layout will (if required) crop, resize and optimize the desired picture and keep only this image as part of the document. Hence a much smaller file size. Images shot with modern camera’s are often of a very high resolution, often too high for the desired image format. Claro Layout will resize the image, so that only the number of pixels needed for a perfect print remain.

Sales of the beta version of Claro Layout starts now. the Final release of Claro Layout is due for September. The beta version is available right here (OSX and Windows) and may be subject to small changes.

Editor’s note: I saw a demo of the new Claro Layout Plugin in Brussels and I have to say I was a little skeptical at first. How can one possibly automate such a thing as sharpness of an image for example? But the demo was quite impressive.

In their own words: “Automatic image enhancement is a real challenge. What is good for one image is not good for the other. A straightforward hot folder solution, simply applying one set of filters and algorithms to every image in a hot folder, will simply not do the job. Although it seems contradictory, automatic image enhancement needs an individual approach. With its Claro Individual Image Analysis, Claro analyses every individual image thoroughly, looking for such parameters as: sharpness, brightness, contrast, color balance, natural greens, skin tones and other parameters”.