Accurip and Illustrator CS5

[inkbrigade]

Running Accurip latest version and Adobe Illustrator CS5 on Mac OSX 10.7.3

I have an object, one end of the object is spot orange.  The other end is spot red. They merge about in the middle.

For some reason at the merge area (50% area) i have holes which would show the white underbase when i print out and register the films. It's like the dots are on top of each other instead of next to each other which would cover up the underbase.

I printed out an old film which use to print successfully last year, and it had the same "Hole" issue.

It has to be an accurip issue. Anyone else having this issue? Or an idea for a work around?

http://imgur.com/jYyOR
http://imgur.com/4iVwC

Thanks,
Jamie

[ZooCity]

It's like the dots are on top of each other instead of next to each other

That's because they are.  I've worked and worked on this with Charlie and it's just the way it is.  Technically speaking, it's a gradient and fill issue with the way Adobe programs assign the fill areas at various percentages and then this how Accurip interprets this.

It's a major issue for me.  The work around is you solid fill the gradient area with one of the colors, let's say our spot red.  Copy the fill area and align it overtop the spot red one.  Assign a gradient to this overprint guy that goes from no fill to your spot orange.  I find this method, well, pretty damn stupid for wet on wet printing.  It puts down more ink than is necessary, can contaminate the overprint screen with the underprint color and makes crappo gradients compared to truly interlocked gradients.  If you go ahead an flash the underprint color you now have crisp little halftones on top which is a sad replacement for a nice, blended gradient in my humble opinion.  It's a shame because I like to use gradients and especially gradient blends but often will not include them due to this headache.

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.   But I digress....Hopefully Charlie doesn't mind but here's the end of a long troubleshoot we did on this last year:

From Charlie:

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

My reply:

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. 

Who's got an inkjet rip that avoids this issue?

[inkbrigade]

You gotta be kidding me! Why is this not noted on their support site! Why have i been emailing all day with some girl doing support for them and she didn't have the freaking answer. Not cool. NOT COOL!!!

I spent 2 days on this bullshit!

Your tip about putting half a gradient over the spot color was what i ended up figuring out. Your right this is a band aid at best.

I know for a fact this did NOT use to be an issue. We did a gradient in the spring of 2011 and it worked just fine. So in some accurip update this changed.

Hopefully i can get an old copy of accurip and be back in business.

Thanks for writing. I'm glad i'm not nuts on this.. Just pissed. - jamie

[Gilligan]

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?

[inkbrigade]

Sounds like you might.

[IntegrityShirts]

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.

[ZooCity]

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?

Kevin, run the index routine I suggested above.  You'll get those greens.  In accurip, you'll get stacked dots or, if you offset the angles, a cheezy gradient and spotty coverage on the garment.  Index is best for this.  You can search a few tutorials on the web regarding index seps generally speaking but you'll have an easier time with it in PS just spot filling with a simple two color blend.  The big thing is to match the ppi to your screen's mesh so it can resolve the little square dots. 

Oh and did you get your mesh alight?  Sorry about shipping so late, I came down with shingles (with neuralgia, lucky me!) early this month and was only firing a couple cylinders there for a moment. 

Jamie, I'm with you man.  I love Charlie, he's a good man, love the simplicity and low entry cost for accurip, but I spent days on this before as well and so did he it seems.  It's self defeating to be able to drop in gradients quickly in illustrator without breaking up your flow too much but then not be able to output them correctly without a lengthy routine.  To be fair, gradients are naturally difficult, and they are made a little tougher to deal with by the way Adobe handles them. 

But, there has to be a rip out there that can interpret this.   I'm sure it's one of the higher end ones like Wasatch's.   

So who can output gradients easily and what are you using?

[ZooCity]

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.

Honestly, I don't mind the tones you get from bitmaps in PS.  If the res is high enough, they can be quite nice and you get a bonus preview of your output.  But I wouldn't print from PS in CS5, place the into Illy along with your vector parts and assign the tiff as the same spot color. 

The big benefit of Accurip is that it's a cheap and clean way to output seps very quickly and efficiently.  What I don't get is why epson printers don't have postscript built in.  You could easily use the print dialog in illy to do just about everything you need. 

[Rockers]

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

[ZooCity]

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.

[Dottonedan]

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

The halftone feature is a pretty rocking plugin.  Love that. Gonna get it...as soon as I get my other drive back and hopefully my CS5 is still available to me on that. Thats another story.

[Rockers]

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.

Try their website for some you tube videos and download the trial version. The other plugins they do are great too, makes working in Illustrator a breeze.

[blue moon]

not sure, but I would guess that for accurate output you would need to calibrate your dot sizes. If your 20% is printing as a 10% you will have a gap when next to the 80% dot. If the 80 prints as 70, the blank area could be quite large. I know my 50% was printing as aprox 65 before calibration. . .

pierre

[Dottonedan]

It's like the dots are on top of each other instead of next to each other

I had this problem way back when some of you were just getting off of your bicycles and playing with Stretch Armtrong and began to think about girls and well before Acurip came out. This was a problem from way back and it's only in the way Illy handled gradients. I don't know about Corel, but Freehand didn't have this problem and Photoshop doesn't. It's a vector math thing. I don't know this to be "THE REASON" for a fact, but it makes sense when you think about it. Illy has to have a WHITE that is a Knock out white. If you want to print a Plate, Screen Sep that is a white, you need to create a custom spot color white. We all know that. The kicker here is that this is why you have issues with gradients. In Illy, It's all MATH. The problem is that the MATH or algorithms isnt apparently THAT ADVANCED to knock this out 100% in a blend. It does not reverse exactly. You can even see it in gradients in the middle where it looks washed out or lighter. We even printed straight to Adobe postscript printers and still had tha tproblem. Always did. It's not a CS5 thing. If you had better results with an older version, the better results are from "some other source" and not because CS4 or 3 did something better or different. For fun, I'll tell ya that I was using this method back in 1989 on laserwiter printers on paper and then shot with a stat camera. Then we progressed to (God love them) true imagesetters. Ah, those were the days when men were men and girls were girls.

Zoo seems to be the type to up on this already. Maybe he's done it (would think so) since he's done the solid part but was not happy with it. I think he would explore and would found this to be better. Maybe not. If not, speak up and tell us why. Here goes.

The smoother work around has to do with the "computer white", aka process white, aka 0% of any color as being a one of two major factors that contribute in this problem. Our work around back then is as it is today, yet we didn't print a solid under it unless we intended it to be that way. As you stated. that would be too thick. The smoother work around is still yet cumbersome and even more so than your solid work around. It's a matter of using "copy and past in front" in combination with the OVERPRINT feature in the ATTRIBUTES window. You just have to think about what layer need to overprint and what layer does not.

Lets say you want to create an orange from Red and Yellow.

Select the path and fill with a gradient using your spot color RED at end but at oh, lets say...65% (Not solid) but now choose OVERPRINT in he attributes.  This is because we are going to copy and past the same path on top and switch the gradient direction...but fill that with the yellow at 25% fill at the color end of the gradient...and out to 0%...but now, drag that slider out even further from the middle to about another 10-15% further from the center. (you are creating overlap of gradients (for one benefit) and for the other), you are ceating blending due to the difference in negative and positive dot space. From 25% on the yellow versus the 65% on the red. This together, causes a thrashing of wet inks creating a great Orange but not too much coverage.  The coverge all depends on the appearance of the original gradation intended. Some gradients are very abrupt and some fade out ever so softly and subtly so you need to adjust accordingly. Some for example, may require a solid coverage under the gradient.

The reason for the overprint being selected is you need to tell Illy what you want to do with that computer white aka 0%.
Overprinting the spot color tells Illy that the spot color doesn't get knocked out by any computer white on top of it (e.g.) the red does not get knocked out by the 0% on the yellow gradient).

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.

I will simply say this about indexing. I'm not a fan of it for blending 1 or two colors together. 3-8 yes, but not just two. The only way it does well on just two is IF you have a high enough resolution in your file, like (I use 270ppi) on a 330 mesh. That will give you a very small dot (not so noticeable to the eye). The issue with just two on garments is "typically", screen pritners do'nt use HIGH rez and don't use HIGH mesh in most all cases when dealing with these typical blends. 230 is a high for most people AND, most tutorials will tell you to use some gawd aweful rez like 180 on a 305 mesh. Yuck.  Like Forest Gump says, "Thats all I have to say about that".

As to using Photoshop, saving as tiffs etc. Yes, I agree 100%. It's a great way to get around vector blends...and in addition, (Why then, not just go ahead and use regular halftones from Illy since (in this element in question, is being placed into photoshop to create you own more precise blends. You may as well use reg halftones and not use indexing. here, you can manually control what goes where in the gradients, save then as grayscale tiffs etc. and drop them into Illy (just like described for indexing).

Anyways, the above is something I expect a rip to do.

  Ya know, I agree. We would expect that, but it hasn't been the case so far with Illy being involved. It's not the RIPS fault. I know this, because we still ran into the same issue when using several costly high end rips. One was called Crystal Raster and a few others at various company's.

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

  I hear ya.  I thought about the same thing. Mark Coudrey still keeps one running and has a few backups yet even he says they are all but gone. Nobody can even be found to work on them. Well, very few. He also still does use the digital printers but his are a little higher end that the average bear.

Pierre is right as well, but that specific situation is not necessarily the case in this one. Some effects are similar in his examples, but not for the same reasons here. He is right tho, in all cases we all need to calibrate our film output devices about every 4-6 months on average and more if you print a lot of film every day. Every time you switch ink brands, clean the rollers or do general maintenance, it doesn't' hurt to re calibrate.

It's great to see the halftone geeks come out of the zoo.   I didn't know you were that versed.

[Gilligan]

Man, my cup runnith over with information here... thanks Dan... now I just have to figure out how to digest and understand it.