Pixelation in Onyx Thrive 21

[WrapSolutions]

We save files out as EPS from Adobe Illustrator and then RIP the files in Onyx Thrive 21. We never have this issue when creating our own artwork (avoiding excessive clipping masks, stray points, transparencies, appearance styles, etc), but for whatever reason every now and again there is pixelation when printing another designers vector artwork. Sometimes even after rasterizing the artwork to a flat jpg this same issue will occur. Does anyone have any suggestions? (on attached photo the artwork to the left is the actual printed file while the artwork on the right is the adobe illustration vector file)

 

[Boudica]

I've seen this... MANY times. It generally happens when I enlarge the file in Onyx. The best fail-safe workaround I have found is to enlarge the artwork to actual size in Illustrator, and save it as a PDF. Or flatten it in photoshop and save it as a tiff - which is even safer.

Strange that it happens when rasterized and saved as a jpg though. Are you still enlarging the artwork in Onyx after that?

 

[WrapSolutions]

I've seen this... MANY times. It generally happens when I enlarge the file in Onyx. The best fail-safe workaround I have found is to enlarge the artwork to actual size in Illustrator, and save it as a PDF. Or flatten it in photoshop and save it as a tiff - which is even safer.

Strange that it happens when rasterized and saved as a jpg though. Are you still enlarging the artwork in Onyx after that?

Thank you! And yes we always scale up by 10. I'm retrying this one a couple different ways and one is the same but just as a PDF. Maybe that will do the trick.

 

[unclebun]

I think there is something wrong with Illustrator. I recently went through an issue where a t-shirt shop designed a church logo in Illustrator and sent it to us so we could make their sign. But simple geometric shapes were messed up. Circles had little spurs coming off them, triangles had wavy lines, and the font (Garamond) had wavy lines, uneven serifs, bad corners and all kinds of other abnormalities. It showed up in png files, svg files, and pdf files. It didn't matter whether I opened them in Corel Draw or Illustrator. She sent me a screenshot of a closeup of the letters and they looked fine on her screen. I finally had to just redraw the shapes and retype the letters myself.

 

[Boudica]

Thank you! And yes we always scale up by 10. I'm retrying this one a couple different ways and one is the same but just as a PDF. Maybe that will do the trick.

It seems to occur in tandem when blowing up the graphic in Onyx. Try clipping out a sample (of a problem area) of the artwork, enlarge it to actual size and print that. See if it's still doing it.

 

[JBurton]

It's odd to me that the vector and it's drop shadow have artifacts in the same areas, but not the exact same. If I were trying to determine the issue, I'd start by getting rid of that layer.
Also you've got some gnarly banding there...