How Elpical’s Claro Premedia solves problems at De Persgroep

‘High availability and product quality are the two main reasons why we chose to work with Elpical’s Claro Premedia’.

Intelligent automated image processing is helping De Persgroep Publishing meet challenges in a print and online environment.

The wholly-owned subsidiary of De Persgroep – a company which has expanded from a local, Flemish media company to a leading bi-national organisation –is active in newspapers, magazines and new media and home to a number of market leaders, including Het Laatste Nieuws, Dag allemaal, Goed Gevoel and HLN.be.

The turnover of de Persgroep is around 750 million Euros; group turnover of one billion Euros makes it one of the largest media companies worldwide.

Like other publishing houses, dPP faces significant challenges in the future. The ongoing financial recession puts pressure on revenues – especially from advertising. Additionally the advertisement market is experiencing a shift to digital media and television, taking away revenue from traditional print advertising. Lower consumer confidence is yet another trend in the reader market: People buy fewer individual issues and are switching titles more often.

dPP has continued to flourish in this changing landscape. Through its focus on traditional print and embracing new digital media, the group has managed to maintain, and for a number of titles even improve reader numbers. Investment in a joint IT platform improves performance and reliability, while decreasing costs, and this is where Elpical Claro Premedia comes into the picture.

Claro Premedia – high availability and superb quality

In 2009 de Persgroep Publishing started a division in the Netherlands, acquiring some of the major local newspapers including Algemeen Dagblad, de Volkskrant and Het Parool. All existing ICT systems were migrated and integrated in the existing ICT platform in Asse, Belgium.

Marc Roelants, ICT Project Leader – Editorial and Advertising Systems (pictured) explains: “With the growing number of publications, automating the production of these publications became crucially important. It is the only solution which can reduce human intervention and therefore errors. Especially so because we also face the challenge of automating our production workflows in such a way as to make it possible to publish both to paper and digitally online and on mobile devices.”

As part of this automation and ICT integration process dPP migrated their image workflows to Claro Premedia in December 2012. They invested in two Claro Premedia 9 environments – one for production and one for testing and development – each consisting of two virtualised servers.

This implementation happened in close collaboration with dPP’s ‘Flash Center’ department that takes care of all production related operational processes within dPP; such as PDF and image optimization. Steven Baelen, Flash Center Manager explains: “We chose Claro Premedia as our image enhancement software based on the intelligent image processing and therefore the excellent image quality.”

In order to make the integration possible, the software needed to have robust automation capabilities, coupled with excellent image optimisation that allowed individual images to be further optimised by dPP’s Flash Center. It also needed to function in a dynamic way, using job tickets and web services to drive it from the larger workflow system. Elpical Claro Premedia fulfilled all of these needs, and that is why dPP finally went with the solution after analysing the different products on the market today.

Says Marc Roelants: “If we have to pick the two main reasons why we chose to work with Claro Premedia then it would be high availability and product quality.

“On top of that, the implementation of Claro Premedia in our workflow went very smoothly. We’ve received excellent support from Elpical and their distributor Four Pees. We have worked closely together in the development stage and beta testing of the new Claro Premedia 9 version. Even now that we use the product in our daily production, we can always count on an excellent and swift support.”

In order to ensure 100 per cent uptime for Claro Premedia as it is integrated into their production workflow, dPP and Elpical worked on comprehensive cluster support for the new Elpical Claro Premedia 9. This ensures that a server with software or hardware problems doesn’t affect the entire image processing system – the load is dynamically shifted to the remaining processing servers.

Automated image Processing with intelligence

De Persgroep Publishing handles a huge number of images day-in, day-out. So many that it would be cost prohibitive (not to mention too time-consuming) to optimise all of them manually. This is the typical scenario where Elpical Claro excels. Not just because it can handle a vast number of images in a short period of time, but also (and mainly) because it knows its own limits.

“Starting with version 9, Elpical Claro can be configured in a true cluster configuration. This ensures high availability and provides load-balancing across multiple servers, ” says John De Jong, CEO of Elpical Software: “This is of course very important to our bigger customers. However, it is the built-in quality control that is the most important functionality.”

Elpical Claro automatically calculates how good its image optimisation algorithm performed on every single image it processes. Depending on the workflow, you can then decide what percentage of images you want to process completely automatically and what percentage to keep aside for manual inspection and further manual cleanup. Claro comes with a Claro Inspector plug-in for Adobe Photoshop where a retoucher can see the original and processed image. This allows a quick decision on whether the original or the processed image is better and allows further manual processing in Photoshop.

“You can mix this automatic and manual mode in one Elpical Claro installation,” says John De Jong: “This allows a publisher to make different workflows for different magazines or newspapers for example.

“For some publications completely automatic processing might be the best option, while for high-quality, glossy magazines every image could be pre-processed by Claro but quality controlled and further optimized by a photo retoucher in Photoshop. That’s really the best of two worlds”.

About Elpical: Elpical Software, an international company with offices in The Netherlands and Germany, develops and markets software solutions for automating image production, manipulation and optimization as well as image workflow processes in general, based on extensive image analysis technology. Elpical, established in 1997 by a management buy-out of the Electronic Imaging department of Victor Hasselblad AB, is a leading specialist in digital image enhancement and management. Elpical's key products include Claro Premedia, Claro Single, Organic Imaging,  4LeafClover and EmailManager. Elpical is an ideal partner for software suppliers and integrators who want to integrate Elpical technology with their own applications. More information is available at www.elpical.com

Elpical Software B.V.
Nijverheidsstraat 9 
NL-
6987 EN GIESBEEK

Tel: +31 (0) 313 633 156
Fax: +31 (0) 313 633 641
Email: info@elpical.com

Web: www.elpical.com

Managing Director: 
John de Jong