I'm having trouble with banding when printing gradient fills on my versacamm. The one I'm working on now is a radial blend, fading from beige to white. I've tried converting the background to a bitmap before sending it to print. I've also tried increasing the fill steps when I export the file, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Some of the bands have almost a greenish tint to them.
Anyone experience this, and how did you fix it?
Suelynn
-------------------- "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -George Eliot
Suelynn Sedor Sedor Signs Carnduff, SK Canada Posts: 2863 | From: Carnduff, SK Canada | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
I have had luck with converting to bitmap. Are you exporting from Corel?
-------------------- Jerry VanHorn, Pres. Pure Sports Designs, LLC Pro Sign Design / United Wholesale Signs www.prosigndesign.comwww.unitedwholesalesigns.com West Liberty, OH 937-465-0595 866-942-3990 Since 1990 Posts: 925 | From: West :Liberty, OH | Registered: May 2004
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If from Corel. Copy your background to the clipboard. Then open Corel Photopaint and do FILE: New from CLIPBOARD. Copy and paste back to your Corel DRAW file. This bitmap conversion usually works better than just converting in Corel Draw alone.
-------------------- Jerry VanHorn, Pres. Pure Sports Designs, LLC Pro Sign Design / United Wholesale Signs www.prosigndesign.comwww.unitedwholesalesigns.com West Liberty, OH 937-465-0595 866-942-3990 Since 1990 Posts: 925 | From: West :Liberty, OH | Registered: May 2004
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posted
Sue, The best way I have found to do Gradients for the versacamm is to create the gradient in Photoshop(Continuous tone)or Photopaint program. Corel or vector programs create Gradients by making 100s of separate colored lines hence the banding.(If you want to keep using Corel try bumping up the fountain steps on your .eps export filter) We just create our shape/lettering in Signlab then export it to Photoshop and apply all the eyecandy there. Then I'll Bring it into Corel and apply the CutPath Color.
posted
I think William has got it. Illustrator has the same problems with printing gradients. I would also suggest taking it into Photoshop for the gradients.
-------------------- Kelsey Dum Dum Designs Sherwood, AR 72120 501.765.2166 kelsey@dumdesigns.com Posts: 827 | From: Sherwood, AR | Registered: Oct 2005
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Banding can be caused by several "mechanical" factors. The fact the banding is manifesting itself as a greenish twinge suggests that the problem may be printhead related (misalignment or misfiring) but there are other possibilities. Media/profiling is another.
I would suggest calling your supplier's tech support. They probably have a trouble-shooting process for eliminating possibilities, one at a time. Once they know the root of the problem, they can help you take steps to fix it.
-------------------- Jon Aston MARKETING PARTNERS "Strategy, Marketing and Business Development" Tel 705-719-9209 Posts: 1724 | From: Barrie, ON, CANADA | Registered: Sep 2000
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-------------------- Jerry VanHorn, Pres. Pure Sports Designs, LLC Pro Sign Design / United Wholesale Signs www.prosigndesign.comwww.unitedwholesalesigns.com West Liberty, OH 937-465-0595 866-942-3990 Since 1990 Posts: 925 | From: West :Liberty, OH | Registered: May 2004
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posted
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll do a little experimenting. Sounds like I'm going to have to learn how to use photoshop too. My brain is starting to hurt!
-------------------- "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -George Eliot
Suelynn Sedor Sedor Signs Carnduff, SK Canada Posts: 2863 | From: Carnduff, SK Canada | Registered: Nov 1998
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I dont know about the versacamm but if you are talking about banding as in "stepping" then its not a printer issue. You can use the suggestions above and we have always had good luck in adding a little "noise" in Photoshop. One of the issues though is color shifting when you start tweaking your original file - you can go into the color channels and remove unwanted colors after adding noise to help. Just taking the image to Photoshop is going to really mess up your colors though (if its a critical color match)
-------------------- Brian Stoddard Northwest Wholesale Signs
All of the suggestions worked to some degree. The banding almost dissapeared just by bringing it into photopaint as Jerry & William suggested. By making the banding so much better, the darker greenish bands disappeared.
I tried the photoshop suggestion from Bruce & Kelsey, and it worked even better. I pasted the file in, used the blur tool (in normal mode at 50%strenght, this must be the default, as I never use my photoshop program) I exported it as both a tiff and a bmp and was amazed at both results. Not even a HINT of a band anywhere, and the color stayed very true to the original. I also tried Jons suggestion and downloaded the correct ICC profile. Since converting to max inks, I've got all the max profiles for the GCVP, PVC2 Roland products, so I've just been using those with Oracal media. I downloaded the oracal profile, and it printed the tan color as more of a rosy-beige than the greenish hue it had before. I thought I really had it cased when I opened the original file and saw that it really did appear greenish-beige on the screen. I'd say the PCV2 profile is still a much better match to the color on the screen.
Thank you all for the very useful suggestions, another $50.00 worth of information! ha ha
I hope others can learn from this too.
Suelynn
-------------------- "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -George Eliot
Suelynn Sedor Sedor Signs Carnduff, SK Canada Posts: 2863 | From: Carnduff, SK Canada | Registered: Nov 1998
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