Gradient Help! Poor prints - CMYK or RBG?

[ProVogue]

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to wide format printing, but I've been able to start printing motocross graphics and some vehicle wraps without major problems. I know some people are designing in either CMYK or RGB and everyone has different preferences. I am told that if its a vector design it should remain in CMYK.. My problem is that when I do any gradients in my vector designs, the spot color prints out FADED or LIGHT! If I print in RGB, I don't have this problem - The Blue gradient comes out in it's true spot color with no faded look.

So why am I not wanting to just stick with RGB? Well I print a lot of black and what I found is when we're printing black in RGB it has a purplish/reflective look in the sun. When we print with CMYK the black is a true black and looks great.

How can I get the happy medium!?

I am designing in Illustrator - saving in EPS - Printing out of Versaworks on my XC-540. (If I try to save in PDF, versaworks never reads my colors if they're in a gradient)

Thanks for any help you may offer..

 

[myront]

Two problems I see. One is you should NEVER print, export or save as any clipart with gradients as eps. You will make me and many others very angry. We always use hi res tiff rgb or cmyk. Pdf is a good option too though.
No need to get into problem #2. LOL

 

[rjssigns]

PDF issues with Versaworks: Take the PDF and burn a Postscript file out of Acrobat and run that. Works a treat.

 

[SightLine]

Also if using RGB makes your blacks 0,0,0..... What we always use anyways and never have seen any sort of purplish look. Then again we do not use Versaworks nor do we have a Roland so I really don't know if that makes any difference. Mimaki driven with Flexi here... We also just use the native Illustrator ai files or sometimes PDF (just about the same thing - you can actually rename an Illustrator ai file to .pdf and Acrobat will open them). CMYK has a narrower gamut and makes larger files than RGB.

On gradients though.... yeah that's hit and miss. They seem to work best for us when we use RGB colors and save as a PDF. Pantones and transparency in gradients generally will not render properly in Flexi - in those case we rasterize it as a tiff in Photoshop first.

 

[omgsideburns]

We also just use the native Illustrator ai files or sometimes PDF (just about the same thing - you can actually rename an Illustrator ai file to .pdf and Acrobat will open them)...

It should be noted that this only works if the AI files are saved with the "Create PDF Compatible File" option checked.

If I am creating complicated files, or files that have lots of linked (placed) objects, I don't usually tick that option because it increases file size.