how do you all deal with a gradient as far as matching colour?

[gabagoo]

Gradients spell trouble for me.
I have a file sent to me and the designer has the pms colours set. One colour blends to the next colour so there is no real easy way for me to be able to change the colour to one that more closely resembles the pantone due to the constant colour shifts in the gradient. I ran a test to see how close I was without tweaking and I am way off. The green is to dark and the orange looks almost perfect.

I would probably redo the gradient once I find a matching colour but will I get it exact? probably not and the job is not large and the customer is finicky.

How do you guys deal with this issue?

 

[Custom_Grafx]

Hi, which RIP are you using? If VW, I would trial and error playing with the ink adjustment sliders in the 'colour adjustment' area.

You might want to slide down the cyan a little to give less ink? The problem is though with this method, you're going to change the colour of the green. Will take a bit of playing around.

The right way of course, is to correctly profile your machine with an i1 or whatever.

Another way, if you use the roland colour chart, would be to match the start and end colours of the gradient to a roland swatch colour. punch those into illustrator, and make a gradient with it. I have never tried this, but in theory it should work.

 

[bob]

Gradients spell trouble for me.
I have a file sent to me and the designer has the pms colours set. One colour blends to the next colour so there is no real easy way for me to be able to change the colour to one that more closely resembles the pantone due to the constant colour shifts in the gradient. I ran a test to see how close I was without tweaking and I am way off. The green is to dark and the orange looks almost perfect.

I would probably redo the gradient once I find a matching colour but will I get it exact? probably not and the job is not large and the customer is finicky.

How do you guys deal with this issue?

What are you trying to match, one or both end points or somewhere in the middle?

If it's in the middle, good luck.

If it's either or both end points it's not hard. One thing to be sure to do is make the gradient CMYK and not RGB. This is one of the few if not the only time you want to have something in CMYK before you output it. You'll find that the end points on a CMYK gradient will match whatever color they're supposed to be orders of magnitude better than an RGB gradient.

Next; jack up whatever RIP you're using's gradient algorithm to the highest quality available to you.

 

[Graphics2u]

Try changing the rendering intent to saturation for gradients if it's not already. I accidently found out that this gave me much close colors on gradients in flexi anyway.