"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
It's like the dots are on top of each other instead of next to each other
Hi Chris, I just did a ton of testing and this is what I find. When using a single angle screen (I tested multiple different angles (22.5/45/61) all the same angle for each separation test) the films print dot on dot from both the Xerox PS laser printer (not using AccuRIP) and the Inkjet (using AccuRIP). This makes it an absolute answer that it is not the RIP creating this effect it is the use of single angle. If you want the blends from Illustrator to be "lock and key" you will have to use multiple angles on separate films to get that to happen. This is the way the data is streamed from Adobe and has nothing to do with the laser print driver or the RIP. The best resolve I see for what we have discussed before is what I offered previously. Make a solid spot color shape, lay on top of that a gradient made of one spot color fading from 90% down to 2% and apply over print. This way the gradient will print over a solid color giving you the smooth blend you desire will color between halftones. Easiest and the way it has been down since the late 80's. If you discover a better or faster way to do this please share it with me. I'd love to learn it. Thanks
Off-setting the angles for each color does help but does not make the gradient "lock and key" unless there is a magic combination of angles I'm not aware of. I consider this a band-aid fix as having various offset angles may not be best for the rest of the art. Yep, printing a single spot gradient over top a solid fill does work. Again, it's a band-aid with plastisol printing as it frustrates proper wet-on-wet printing can tend toward muddy gradients, ink contamination and may necessitate a flash which then in turn frustrates the blending of said 2 color gradient and is also bad for production. I think this method would work just fine, and probably be optimal, for discharge/wb printing due to it's inherent blending properties but not so much for plastisol in my opinion.
I have a print coming up that I think will cross into this unless I'm missing something.I have a yellow and blue screen and the customer has artwork that over laps 60/40 and wants green to come out of that. He's not picky about the shade but it's a solid block of green where the yellow and blue overlap. Not large areas mind you but still at least 1"x1".Won't I have the same issues?
Man, I was really close to switching over to Epson JUST so I could have a RIP from illustrator, that suuuuucks. Guess I'll stick with my hp printer for a while longer and print 'tones out of photoshop ugh.
May I bring everyone's attention to Astute Graphics Phantasm CS plugin for Illustrator. It's a great little plugin for doing color adjustments, working with embedded images and dealing with halftones. Great per press tool. http://www.astutegraphics.com/products/phantasm/index.html
Phantasm CS looks really cool, I checked it out long ago but didn't buy it. Can you simply assign halftones within illy with this to certain areas? Give me a breakdown of how this would be used before or even without a rip.
If you really want it to be tight, my preferred line of attack is to place your fill area, at size of course, into PS and use a routine of assigning gradients to the shape(s) and then indexing the sucker into the two colors you want. {watch you ppi here as that's what's dictating the size of the square dots that you will ultimately output to film in an index file} Extract each gradient color into a bitmap an then save each individual gradient color as a tiff. Place them back into illy, align and stack accordingly, assign overprints as needed and assign your spot colors to the tiff files. Output sweet ass gradient. On press, the perfectly interlocked square dots will gain just enough to blend. If you can run the ppi and subsequently, your mesh high enough to hold really small dots you can work some magic. I wish I had a pic handy of one I did years ago with this method. It's unreal how much secondary and tertiary color you can get this way. And if registration is tight the color is actually quite controllable though I did do a press check on that particular one as it was tough to predict on screen.
Anyways, the above is something I expect a rip to do.
Accurip is a clean, simple, budget rip that does a couple of things very well and totally fails on some other things. This is one of them. I'm not sure what else to say or do about it myself except for save up for another solution and use workaround in the interim. The more I mull it over the more I want to buy a wide format imagesetter from someone on the cheap who has no need for it provided I can afford the servicing it will need and can find someone who can actually service it