Flattening issue... I think

[DoubleDiamond]

We have been having an issue for about a year with this one customers art. We are doing the fifth wrap for them and I keep promising we will get the yellow background to be a very bright yellow. We've have tried many time consuming tests and we have had to settle on one that comes close... but not really the bright yellow I know we can do. When we make a box alone and color it we print a great looking yellow, but we add a mostly blue logo and text we get a greenish yellow as a background. We tried to remove the background and flatten everything with a transparent background, then bring in the yellow background it still alters the background. We are trying this in ai and ps both cs3 and the latest cc version. We have overcome this flattening issue before mostly by just saving as a jpg, but not this time. It keeps looking like it's flattening and altering the whole background or just the areas around the art. What we are looking for is any recommendation of how to save the photoshop layered created file to print unchanged on the roland sp-540v.

 

[Solventinkjet]

I'm not a color expert but it sounds like you may be getting an optical illusion from the blue logo on the yellow back ground. I would print a small version and cover the logo with a piece of paper. Does the background now look bright yellow? If you remove the paper does it look greenish again? If that doesn't do it, try going into your RIP and do a color replacement. You can adjust the amount of each color. In this case you would probably want to do 100% yellow and take everything else out.

 

[jfiscus]

Are you working with RGB or CMYK files?
What color setting is your photoshop set to?
What color mode/setting is their document coming in to you in?
What are you creating your "yellow square" in?

 

[DoubleDiamond]

Flattening

I think the pic worked. I am pretty sure it's a flattening issue. The yellow box to the right is from adobe using the roland color swatches. Prints just fine by itself, as always. If you look close at the logo, there are parts of it in the right color, but there are boxes around the drop shadows that are greenish. We have often fixed this and know that in ai you must flatten to print the feather or drop shadow effect. When that does not work, we usually open in ps in order to save as a large jpg. The flattening issues typically are no longer an issue and we have minor but noticeable color changes. In most cases this is ok. But now on this job any file type we try to save in ps shows the boxes around objects. The file is rgb and we have tried cmyk. It was originally created in ps and we have tried to separate the layers and recreate it in ai, but either we flatten or it gets flattened during a save giving us slightly different but similar results. Sometimes the whole background is greenish and sometimes it's boxed around the flattened images. I am trying a few more things right now, like creating a transluscent png in ps and importing it to ai. Then on another layer create the yellow box behind it. Save as a pdf. We have tried over 20 things and nothing works, but on another job with a red background and a feathered effect in ai, I deleted the feather and it was just fine... but no feather. On this job we cannot remove the drop shadow. I will also try turning everything to cmyk, but that has in the past made the blues less brilliant. We will change the blues in this case. We are also trying everything else we can think of and any suggestions that come up that we have not tried. Thanks for your time and help, DD

 

[J Hill Designs]

in the photo you can see the correct yellow outside the 'bounding box' of the drop shadow.

transparency issue.

do you have rendering intents set to the same for raster and vector elements?

 

[jfiscus]

send me the file jason(at)cruxroadboardz(dotcom)

 

[DoubleDiamond]

Fixed it... I think

The exact same file prints absolutely fine on a nearby machine using FLEXI. The same Roland sp540v machine, the same photoshop tiff cmyk file, but not ran through versaworks... this leads me to believe versaworks has a problem keeping the colors and art unaltered. We also cannot get a nice yellow from ps at all. In ai the roland color palette prints fine if the file contains only vector, but all colors change and clipping boxes appear around raster images, or drop shadows/feather effects. I find this issue discussed here on signs101 and others on a google search, but no SOLUTIONS. This wrap we are doing is luckily being printed off-site, but in the future I need a solution for ripping/printing without color changing, etc. I there a ripping service available that works with versaworks? Any suggestions or solutions are greatly appreciated. DD