Ink Matte Control on every reflective surface

Print an ink film over a reflective surface and the reflection beneath gets dulled — the ink scatters incoming light before it reaches the substrate and again on the way back to the eye. V3R now models this directly across every substrate type that has any specular character: foil, rainbow holographic, brushed metal, glitter, plastic, clear film, and pearlescent papers. Each ink layer's coverage feeds into a live mask that locally reduces the substrate's specular response, giving you the soft, partly-mirrored look real ink-on-reflective-stock has rather than the unrealistically pristine reflection of earlier builds.

The physics is split correctly between ink types. Translucent inks — CMYK, fluorescent neons, ECG, generic spots, and the ColorLogic CMYK pass — dull the substrate in proportion to how much ink film sits on the surface, scaled by their opacity slider so a single-pass run dulls less than a double-pass. Opaque-at-100% inks — white, metallic, and the ColorLogic Silver / White / Custom Metallic effects — only contribute when their opacity is reduced, since at full opacity they completely hide the substrate and there's nothing left to dull.

A single Ink Matte Control slider sits in the Substrate Controls panel whenever a substrate with specular character is active. The default of 0.4 is calibrated to look natural across most jobs; pull it higher for a heavier, more matte ink character, lower for a glossier finish. Each substrate type remembers its own value via the existing Save as Default / Reset to Default / Factory Reset buttons, so you can dial in foil's reflectivity to taste without affecting how brushed metal, plastic, or clear film look.

Rainbow holographic substrates get a bonus: the slider also tames the holographic shimmer where ink covers — the diffraction effect needs an unobstructed surface to work, and now the rainbow correctly recedes beneath ink layers rather than fighting through them. Plain (non-pearlescent) papers are deliberately excluded since there's no sharp reflection to dull on a matte paper surface — ink-on-paper is just print, and shouldn't change with this slider.

Press-pass opacity for neon & ECG inks

Fluorescent and ECG inks now carry their own opacity slider, the same as metallics and white. The default of 100% reflects the recommended single-pass density values supplied directly by the press manufacturers — Ricoh, Sharp, and the rest — so jobs imported with default settings render exactly to spec. Below 100% simulates a thinner ink film, useful for previewing how a single-pass run will look against a job that was costed for two passes, or vice-versa.

Opacity also feeds into the new Ink Matte Control: less ink film on a reflective substrate dulls the reflection less, so the slider gives you a single intuitive control for both visual ink density and substrate interaction.

Matte lamination, properly behaved

Matte lamination has been rebuilt from the surface up. The old model lifted blacks toward grey when the gloss slider sat anywhere below maximum — a side-effect of an over-eager environmental haze that wasn't grounded in how matte film actually scatters light. That haze is gone, and what replaces it is a more honest dimming of sharp reflections that leaves your dark areas dark.

Three controls now do what they say. Matte ↔ Gloss moves cleanly between satin and full gloss. Matte Texture adds the subtle micro-roughness of a textured matte film. Matte Veil is the optional desaturating veil for the heaviest matte stocks. Every slider has a tooltip explaining its role, and the factory default of full gloss means enabling lamination doesn't surprise anyone.

Spot-UV burn-back

Real spot UV applied over a matte-laminated surface locally re-glosses the area beneath — the varnish "burns back" the matte film and reveals a sharp, mirrored finish exactly where the spot is printed. V3R now simulates this faithfully. Drop a varnish layer over a matte-laminated job and the matte effect cancels itself underneath the varnish geometry, with a clean falloff at the edges.

Each varnish layer carries its own Override matte (burn back) toggle, on by default. Turn it off for varnishes that should sit on top of the matte without burning through — a sculptured varnish over matte film, for example, where the goal is texture rather than re-glossing.

Dedicated foil colours in the mapping dropdown

Mapping a custom-named spot to a known foil colour used to mean two steps: pick generic Foil from the dropdown, then open the layer panel and choose Gold (or Silver, or Red) from the foil colour picker. The Layer Mapping Manager now offers eight dedicated foil presets directly — Silver Foil, Gold Foil, Red Foil, Green Foil, Blue Foil, Pink Foil, Purple Foil, Bronze Foil — alongside the existing Holographic option.

Pick the colour you want and the layer arrives in the sidebar already named and configured. The generic Foil (Custom Colour) option remains for when a customer has something genuinely off-spec.

Pick a page from a multi-page companion file

Versioned and variable Duplo or sleeking files often arrive as a single multi-page PDF — page 1's varnish layout, page 2's foil layout, and so on. Until now, Add Layer would silently pull page 1 of the companion regardless of which host page you were viewing. It now opens a thumbnail picker showing every page of the companion file with a low-res grayscale preview, separation count, and a clear selection state.

Single-page PDFs skip the picker entirely and behave exactly as before. Thumbnails are cached per session, so re-importing the same companion onto a different host page is instant. Cancel and Escape both bail out cleanly with no side-effects.

Empty channels default to Ignore

Every PDF arrives with all four CMYK plates whether they hold artwork or not. A black-only Duplo file has perfectly empty Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow plates — and clicking through three "Ignore" selections every time was friction nobody needed. The mapping manager now samples each separation as it loads, and any plate with under 0.05% ink coverage is flagged with a grey ⊘ Empty badge and pre-set to Ignore.

The threshold is generous enough to ignore reg marks and crop artefacts, but anything resembling actual artwork — even sparse work — still appears as a populated layer. The dropdown stays editable, so if you do want to keep an empty layer for some unusual reason, that choice is still yours.