Need Help Banding from file, not printer.

[Jharris81]

So I have posted a few times about this wrap that I have done several times and truthfully I’m still very new to printing vehicle graphics but since I do this job so often and print it so often I always see something new that bothers me or I would like to fix. Good learning experience I guess. So I have a blue to white fade that isn’t the greatest. Seems like that part of the print is always an issue of some sort and have got a lot of the problem solved. One thing left is the gradient is kinda “block”. I have tried all the printer calibrations and different types of files, etc. not saying I have tried everything but I have tried a lot. So I was working on it again and noticed that the “blockiness” is the same. So am I to assume that it is a file issue. Something isn’t rendering right between my layout and the rip file? I use illustrator, export to eps, then rip in veraaworks 5.5. Printer is an xc-540. Hopefully you guys can see this but these where printed with different setting. Slower and unidirectional. You can see the banding but it not perfectly straight banding like a printer issue.

 

[M@CK]

It's called stepping, you can lessen it by adding noise.
I can go into a long-winded explanation about the levels of grays and bla bla, but it's all the same.
Add noise in Photoshop.
Test different values until you get a good result.

 

[Zoogee World]

Have you tried saving as a PDF instead of EPS? I know the EPS format is outdated and sometimes certain things don't print quite as planned in this format.

 

[Jharris81]

I will try the adding noise to the gradient and then trying as a pdf as well

 

[BigNate]

up the number of shades in the gradient - if you only have an 8bit gradient, there are only 256 different shades - up this to at least thousands if not millions of steps.

the noise trick mentioned above works well as a quick-n-dirty solution that 99% of people will not notice.

 

[MikePro]

+1 to stated above that you can simply add more steps to gradient

i've always just created the gradient, and then rasterized it in photoshop with high dpi
add noise and blur to taste, and print as photoshop.eps or .tiff