Match a whole folder of files

A brewery sends forty label files drawn over three years by two agencies and a nephew, and the reds in them are forty slightly different reds. Nobody can see that on a screen. It is plain on a shelf, side by side, in daylight, which is where the customer sees it.

Palettes

A palette is a set of your swatches under a customer's name. Make it under Press → Colours to match… → Palettes. See Match a customer's colour for swatches.

In the Colour tab, choose a palette and Studio shows exactly what it would do, in three parts:

• moves: the colours it would change;
• already on it: reassurance;
• left: colours this palette has nothing for, listed rather than quietly ignored, because somebody would otherwise believe a file is fully on-brand when half of it was never considered.

Then one button. Nothing is changed that was not listed.

A gradient stays a gradient. A shaded disc reads as six separate reds, and Studio groups them into one change anchored on the biggest of them, so the whole band moves by one offset and every pixel keeps its lightness.

Recipes

A recipe does the same steps to every file in a run, because forty files done by hand is forty times four clicks, and the forty-first gets three of them because somebody was interrupted. A run where one sticker is 2″ and the rest are 2.1″ is a run the customer counts.

Make one under File → Recipes…. A recipe is four steps at most:

1. Take the background off, where there is a flat one to take.
2. Put the colours on a palette.
3. Cut every piece to a shape.
4. Size every piece.

The order is fixed and is not a setting. The cut line is traced from transparency, so the background has to come off before anything that depends on the shape.

The recipe panel prints the whole plan first. A bulk change nobody can read before pressing is a bulk mistake waiting for a Friday afternoon. Giving both a width and a height makes each piece that exact size. Giving one measurement keeps each piece its own shape, so a folder of mixed artwork is never squashed into one rectangle.

A file that cannot be read is skipped and counted, not fatal. When the recipe finishes, the status line says how many it ran on.

Palettes, recipes and templates are kept in the shop's account, the same in every browser, and everybody in the shop may change them. One taken away is put away, never deleted.