posted
The follwing diddy is based on this week's adventures as a newbie to digital printing and the circumstances of trying to blow up a teenie weenie logo into a ten foot banner in a program I'm not familiar with...
...sung to the tune of "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits.
"I Dunno Nothing"
Now look at them yo-yo’s that’s not how I'd it You make the banners on the New PC That ain’t workin’ that’s how I'd do it I'd rather make it in Corel, not Flexi Now I'll do this one...err..not sure I can do it All of a sudden I'm feeling dumb Maybe get a vector or a couple of PSDs Uh oh, it won't work with either one
We gotta install grommets in banners Due by Monday deliveries We gotta make the blue a little brighter We gotta move these colour ICC’s
See little Rapid with the CorelDraw and his pencil Yeah buddy that’s his squirrel hair That little Rapid got his own new airbrush That little Rapid, it won't help him there
We gotta show him how to print in Flexi Custom outlines and gradient fills We gotta export through Photoshop Now my headache really kills
I somehow learned to paint with a brush I somehow learned to play them drums Look at this banner, man, sticking in the printer Man, I wish it'd just run And he’s up there, what’s that? EPS files? I'm feeling like a stupid chimpanzee That ain’t workin’! That’s not gonna do it! Would someone show me how this works in Flexi?
I gotta install these suckers by Wednesday The color's corrected...hopefully I need a font now...I'll post in Letterville and hope it comes from Bruce B...
Email ain’t workin’ that’s not gonna do it You wind up crash coursing on the old Flexi Finally it's workin’ thank god I got thru it Banners are printing...and you go WHOOPEE!!!
Banners are printing and you go "WHOOPEE!!!
Have a better week than I just did... Rapid
-------------------- Ray Rheaume Rapidfire Design 543 Brushwood Road North Haverhill, NH 03774 rapidfiredesign@hotmail.com 603-787-6803
I like my paint shaken, not stirred. Posts: 5648 | From: North Haverhill, New Hampshire | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Music is a great form of therapy. No matter what you do with it... blast it, play it just below hearing range and sing out loud, or rewrite the words to a favorite song. Good Stuff Rapid!
The Smoke on the Water side of the Moon
-------------------- The Moon aka: Stefenie Harris Moonlight Designs Pollock Pines, CA learnin' somethin' new every day! stefenie@comcast.net Posts: 550 | From: Pollock Pines, CA, USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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good one Ray. I've had my inkjet less then 5 months... & I've only used my Flexi for the same 5 months.
I've only learned 2 things that may be old news for you...
First one is I don't really bother trying to put much of anything together in Flexi since I have other programs I am much more proficient in. (I find bringing in rastor images to be easiest in most cases for printing even if they started out as vector, but when needed, bringing in vectors, mostly for cut lines, as imported .ai files.
Second one is colors are "approximate" for the standard price... "brighter blues" are available at a higher price. This is not to say I am unwilling to spend time tweaking the color after running small test prints, as I do quite a bit of this & consider it part of the learning curve I signed on for & not the always clients obligation... but I try to "under promise" with color correction at this early stage in my learning curve & then it's easier to "over deliver"
[ January 07, 2006, 06:30 PM: Message edited by: Doug Allan ]
that made me think of your first day in the french fry section of McDonald's...at the bottom of the ladder LOL. (theoretically)
It's hard for a craftsperson to get all robot-ish at the drop of a hat. I too looked back, just earlier today.
It may be harder now, but you'll be better cuz you'll know how! Don't let it yank a knot in your britches LOL. Just Git-r-Dun! You're in Georgia now big fella! LOL
My backround is in Corel and Adobe programs and most of the elements were created in those.
This was an early stage of the banner crated in Coreldraw...
The backround was a jpeg image found online and the challenge was superimposing the company logo over it. Unfortunately, the artwork we were given and other files we got from the logo creator were both small and raster images. I'd made a few attempts to vectorize the image, but found that, when enlarged it was far too "dirty" to print. Small flaws were magnified and keeping a clean image was near impossible. Earlier this week, I posted the logo's font (very enhanced and enlarged) in hopes that it could be recreated, flood fills and all.
***Special thanks, from everyone here at A2Z, to Bruce for the save. Without the font, I doubt it would have gotten this job done at all. Chinese is on me next time, dude!***
Within Corel Paint, I made the circle section and waves in black and white versions, saved as tiff files. They were then opened in Adobe Streamline and converted to AI format. 3 seperate elements down, two to go.
There were also a series of 9 nautical flags (not shown) that sit below the logo text. Again, they were created as a seperate file in AI format and made so that each flag would be atop the sunset water backround. Wayne, my co-worker did an great job of creating them within Flexi and saving them for later.
Last element...the main company name.
Once the font made it through, I did the majority of the work in Corel (picture above) only to find that it didn't work at all. Enlarging it would "chatter" the outlines and the fill colors weren't working well. Even going to a full size version had troubles. We attempted to publish it to a PDF file and the open it in Photoshop. A few tests worked, but when the flood fills were added, the computer at the shop locked up more than once. Kwunchie finally figured out the solution to the grief. She ran me through the mask commands and I was able to create the gradient in a box and mesh it into the letters with the mask command...slick trick. Buddy, the owner, added the black and white outlines after the text was set, did some excellent rescaling of each element to nail the logo down and ran tests to check the color output.
For myself, I can tell you that it was one of the most frustrating things I've done in a lot of years, but sitting back now I realise that each program we learn can get you into a mindset that is very hard to break out of. Commands in one program may not do the same thing or have as much advance controls as others, vector and raster images are differently percieved by each and most importantly, programs do not always like each other when moving between them.
This took the effort of everyone here at the shop and we now know a lot more than we did last week about each other's backround and, the best part, that we can all get together, discuss, learn, teach and work well as a team.
Alls well that ends well...the prints look great. Now if they only didn't take 2 hours each to do...*sigh* Rapid
-------------------- Ray Rheaume Rapidfire Design 543 Brushwood Road North Haverhill, NH 03774 rapidfiredesign@hotmail.com 603-787-6803
I like my paint shaken, not stirred. Posts: 5648 | From: North Haverhill, New Hampshire | Registered: Apr 2003
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DrCAS Custom Lettering and Design Saint Cloud, Minnesota
"Things work out best for the people who make the best of the way things work out." - Art Linkletter Posts: 6451 | From: Saint Cloud, Minnesota | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
Writing songs, far out! Ray, but what about that strange coloured water??? you near an outfall??? where the Biggest Oysters Grow!!! I admire you,Ray, learning new stuff. Happy New Year!!
John
-------------------- John Lennig / Big Top Sign Arts 5668 Ewart Street, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada bigtopya@hotmail.com 604.451.0006 Posts: 2184 | From: Burnaby, British Columbia,Canada | Registered: Nov 2001
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posted
Ray, I'm glad you got out from last week & don't still have that job looming over your head I feel your pain, as I've had a few hiccups along the way trying to print banners. (you do have a grommet press now don't you?
I'll post a few banners I have done & mention that I designed them all in Illustrator. Then I have developed the habit of setting them up in layers (something I never really used in 15 years of using Illustrator until now... then exporting as a PSD 5 file (retaining layers) This allows me to play with (read: "over use" ) some layer styles to add bevels or shadows... then I save a copy to flatten the whole thing into one tiff file to print.
I'm not sure where the trouble with the gradients in your letters occur, but I do the complete layout in Illustrator(sometimes including placing rastor logos) at 1/10th scale... then enlarge to full scale, export as RGB PSD file 100 dpi.
(Doug, the bloke I get to do our digiprints when needed printed out a 2 ft square of a host of assorted PMS colours for me on his SP540V. I just keep that bundle handy when I have to match a colour, or to create something with a certain colour, and in Corel, I just fill it with the PMS colour I pick from his chart. It's unimportant to me if they're not true to the PMS colours, but I know they will print just like the sample I have if I make the vector that colour...
Someone here a couple of years ago posted an ai file of a grid of PMS colours- was it BarryB?)
-------------------- "Stewey" on chat
"...there are no limits when you aim for perfection..." Jonathan Livingston Seagull Posts: 7014 | From: Highgrove via Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia | Registered: Dec 2002
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there's another Barry who is part owner of a digital printing site called printingdigital.net
They have a download page of some color charts. I also printed out charts on my printer. it has ranges of colors with each of the CMYK values increasing in increments of 10% & shows every possible combination (within those ten degree increments)
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