🚀 go-pugleaf

<aluxelocochon@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I hope you guys can help me. I recently made an ad in adobe illustrator
> which has a greyscale image with an orange to transparent gradient on
> top made by creating an opacity mask. Well on the screen it looks fine

Not being an Illustrator expert it's hard for me to understand this. You
have an orange to transparent gradient? What does this mean? It's opaque
at one end and becomes transparent at the other? That implies some sort
of graphic mobius strip. At what point does it cease to be transparent?
How would the program decide where to put that point? Do you mean you
have an orange gradient on top of a grayscale image that is transparent?
Like an orange that overprints a grayscale image?

> and so I sent it to the comercial printer. However when the comercial
> printer gave us the proof it shows a sort of lighter hue band in the
> area where the orange gradient ends and meets with the grey image
> below. In other words, instead of the gradient blending smoothly with
> the grey image below (as it shows on screen!) there is like a lighter
> strip that just almost ends abrouptly and looks bad where the gradient
> ends.

Ah, I think the fog is clearing. You want the grayscale image to fade
into the orange blend, decreasing density as it approaches the solid
part of the orange blend. Am I right? And then the orange blend
overprints the grayscale?

But one issue I'm not clear on. How many colors is this job supposed to
be? Is it a two color job with Black + Orange? Is it CMYK? Is it CMYK
+Spot? These details are very important in how to address this problem.

> 
> This same thing had happened to me with almost the same ad in the same
> place when I took it to Kinkos to print. However this time the gradient
> and the greyscale image were one rasterized bitmap image exported from
> photoshop. The guy in kinkos was telling me that it is a problem that
> appears because the image has an area of just k and sudddenly it goes
> to color and it not always goes smoothly. Well I told him that in my
> printer at my office that didn't come up, but he told me again about
> the k to color problem which was odd to me because this time it was
> just one image like a photo so I don't see how that could be my
> problem. Anyways I suggested he try printing it from another printer
> there at kinkos and he did and this time it came out without any
> problems. So that solved it that time.

What kind of printer was used? Was one a Postcript printer and one not?
That would created very different results since one would use the screen
drawing mechanism and one would use Postscript. A very common problem we
experience with people who own inkjet printers but don't invest in
Postscript rips. Keep in mind the world of commercial printing is based
on Postscript/Acrobat. No devices in commercial printing use the
computers windowing mechanism to render images.
> 
> But my current case is that the proof from the comercial printing is
> showing this band again, so my question to you all is this: Is this a
> problem that the Comercial printer should solve or is there something I
> can do to correct this in the illustrator file?
> 
> Any help/suggestions will be really appreciated.
> 

Iluustrator warns about using spot colors with transparency but it has a
check box that says "don't show this dialog again" which most people
check and then forget about it.

The solution to your problem (or statement that there is no solution)
requires that we know about the color of the document.

1) Black plus spot
2) CMYK
3) CMYK plus spot.

I would have to know the answer to really know what to tell you. 

Even how to proof it depends on the answer to that question. You might
be experiencing a problem where a CMYK proofer is trying to simulate
spot colors and the final output will be fine. I don't know.

How many colors is the job supposed to be?