Printing services Web sites allowing a user to access the site from the user's home or work and design a personalized product are well known and widely used by many consumers, professionals, and businesses. For example, Vistaprint markets a variety of printed products, such as business cards, postcards, brochures, holiday cards, announcements, and invitations, online through the site www.vistaprint.com. Printing services web sites often allow the user to review thumbnail images of a number of customizable design templates prepared by the site operator having a variety of different styles, formats, backgrounds, color schemes, fonts and graphics from which the user may choose. When the user has selected a specific product design template to customize, the sites typically provide online tools allowing the user to incorporate the user's personal information and content into the selected template to create a custom design. When the design is completed to the user's satisfaction, the user can place an order through the web site for production and delivery of a desired quantity of a product incorporating the corresponding customized design.
Finishes such as foil, gloss, raised print, vinyl, embossment, leather, cloth, and other textured finishes (hereinafter a “secondary finish”) that must be applied to a printed product separately from the traditional ink application are typically reserved only for premium printed products due to the expense, time, and equipment required for design, setup, and application of the premium finishes. To add a premium finish to a printed product, at least one premium finish mask, designating areas where the secondary finish is to be applied versus areas where the secondary finish is not to be applied, must be generated. The generation of the mask requires knowledge of which portions of the design are to be finished using the secondary finish (i.e., foiled, glossed, raised print, or other premium finishes).
Currently, there are no tools for automatically extracting regions of a design designated for application of a premium finish (e.g., foil, gloss, raised print, etc.) which would produce satisfactory results in most cases which corresponds well to human judgment. In the printing world, premium finishes are generally used to accent or highlight features of an image. Generally, the determination of which features look good when accentuated using a premium finish is better left to a human designer because humans can more easily understand the meaning and relationship between the different areas of the image and can quickly select those areas of an image that make sense (to other humans) to highlight and to disregard for highlighting those areas that would detract from the overall aesthetics of the final product. It is difficult to translate this type of human judgment into a computer algorithm. Additionally, upon selection of regions of a given design for premium finish, there are currently no tools for automatically generating a secondary finish mask for the design. Thus, for every print design offered by a vendor, the vendor must expend resources designing one or more associated premium finish masks for that particular design. The design of a premium finish mask is therefore typically performed by a human graphics designer, often the same designer who created the print design. It would therefore be desirable to have automated tools available that would automatically extract regions of a given design for premium finish based on a selected area of the design image, and that would automatically generate one or more premium finish masks specific to the given design in order to minimize the amount of human designer time expended on the creation of a particular design without diminishing the quality of the end design and premium finish aesthetics.
Additionally, often customers of a retail printed products provider may wish to provide an image to be printed, and to apply a premium finish (e.g., foil, raised print, etc.) to portions of the image to be applied to the end printed product. No simple tools or techniques for indicating which portions of the image are to be premium finished exist. Instead, a trained designer must hand create an appropriate premium finish mask specific to the image the customer provided to ensure that the premium finish is applied in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Accordingly, it is difficult and expensive for end customers to add premium finish to their own images. It would therefore be desirable to have available web-enabled tools that allow a customer to provide an image and to indicate regions of the image for application of premium finish. It would further be desirable to provide an intuitive user interface that conforms to editing interfaces that customers are already used to dealing with in other document editing applications.