[Bonelight]

Hi all,

I could really do with your guidance and wisdom as I am having a total headache with accurip.

I print a lot for bands, so the artwork is usually hand drawn/detailled and not easy to vectorise. For this reason, I mostly print from photoshop straight to my epson 1500 as it gives good solid blacks and crisp edges.

However, when I try to print via ACCURIP out of PS (if i need halftones) I get an awful print; the lines are jagged, there are dots everywhere etc.

SO I have been trying to use AI as it is a much better program for outputting films. With the type of artwork I am printing, it's just not possible to convert it to vector, as the files are just too detailed. As far as I am aware however, I need to have it vectorised to tell ACCURIP to print the film as a solid spot colour. As this is not possible, how on earth do I print this through AI and actually use this software? I have the document mode set to CMYK after I pull it in from PS. How do you all do this? It is baffling me and causing me serious problems.

When I first got the trial version of ACCURIP, I printed straight out of PS and I got lovely crisp lines and no random halftones. Since I went to the full version, I have had horrendous issues. I am not a graphic designer and I could really use your help here.

I am trying to output a 4 colour (they will all be spot colours on press) and I need to utilise the halftone capabilities of Accurip to do this.

I would be most grateful for some help regarding this, and to see if anyone else had had these problems and been able to fix them.

Thank you!

 

[Twisted Grafix]

Each channel should be in a grayscale or black & white if printing from AI, PS, or Corel without separation software. Accurip uses the grayscale to "tell" the software how big and far apart the halftones need to be in order to create the proper lightness, hue, and saturation levels.

What is your frequency set at? Too big of a halftone will create a bumpy or jagged line. You may want to increase the frequency, which will decrease the dot size. Too low of a screen mesh can do the same thing.

You don't need to vectorize the art at all to print it. As long as the file is at size & the dpi is good, you can separate the file and send the channels through Accurip using either separation software or do it manually in PS or Corel.

I design in Corel, then either use Separation Software or manually do it for my separations, then output through Accurip to print BOTH raster & vector images. It depends on the artwork.

 

[FlashDave]

You can print raster images from Illustrator. It sounds like you may need to check a few things. Firstly, ACCURIP will print a tone even if there is a 1% in the white (appearing empty space). If supplied artwork is on a white background, I always delete the white as there could be just a little colour lurking in there which can result in small unwanted dots in your film. Make sure the raster image is in Grayscale not RGB, and all solid areas are 100% black.
If using a halftone in ACCURIP say 55lpi 22.5º then this size dot will affect the edges in the solid black areas of the raster image.
I aways print solid raster images (non tone) from AI at a high ACCURIP LPI setting at 180, this keeps it crisp however if you need to print tone, then unfortunately you are stuck with slightly rough edges.
Vector will always stay crisp!

If doing colour seps in Photoshop, I will split the colours each into their own layers and make them all Grayscale, making any solid areas 100% black. Then save each layer as a seperate file, then import these into Illustrator, put regos on them then print to ACCURIP with my chosen settings for that artwork.

Works great for me.

And of course use 300dpi @ 100% print size for your raster artwork files!

 

[Bonelight]

Thank you both so much, I will try what you have suggested and see if that helps, I will certainly try and raise the LPI and see the results. I have had the LPI at 45 for everything so I definitely need to experiment; it never even occurred to me to alter this. It makes me feel so much better that I can output as raster and don't need to vectorise!

Just to confirm a few things, do you print out of AI as greyscale, not CMYK? Or do you import it into AI AFTER it has been converted to grayscale in PS/Corel?

And I take it by 'solid black,' this is the shade of black you get when you threshold an image in PS?

Thanks again to you both for taking your time to help me out

 

[FlashDave]

Just to clarify, Illustrator colour format should be CMYK but any raster image in the document should be Grayscale however CMYK will work also. A solid RGB raster image in a CMYK Illustrator document can print in tones rather than solid.
I check the solid areas of a raster image by using the eye dropper colour picker in both Photoshop and/or Illustrator to determine if the solid areas are in fact 100% black and not made up from colours or less than 100% black. Sometimes you can select an RGB file in a CMYK Illustrator document and choose 'Edit - Edit Colours - Convert to grayscale'. This will often push the RGB black into 100% black (CMYK) and is a quick way of dealing with it.

 

[Twisted Grafix]

I design it in RGB and Pantone, then export the full color image to Separation Studios. It has a densitometer that automatically reads the levels. You can use the tools to fix small or large areas as well as the entire image by channel. It saves it as a dcs2.0 file, so no need to do the extra steps of converting anything manually to output.

If I'm doing manual separations for a vector image, then I just turn each color to black if there are no gradients. If there are gradients, then I grayscale each channel.