Printing Gradients on Roland Printer

[Mr. Sign Pro]

I am having/have had trouble printing a smooth gradient on my Roland SC-540. The gradient shows up with pronounced line sections where it should be smooth. When I zoom in on the screen the gradient looks nice and smooth. The file type I am using is JPEG. Has anyone came across this issue and is there a remedy?

 

[Tony McD]

Not sure what program you are using, but in Corel you can increase the "fountain steps" to help with this.
The default for fountain steps is 256...bump it to 512 or 1024 and it should be smoother.

 

[Johnny Go]

You might also try cleaning your heads.

 

[ambrartz]

Go EPS... shouldn't but someimtes make all the diffrence..

 

[Sticky Signs]

You could also try rasterizing the gradient in the vector program.

 

[Signarama Grayslake]

yes

Gradients made in photoshop and saved to a tif usually work just fine for me. I never print JPEGS, only pdf, eps , or Tif

 

[Graphicholik3]

I am having/have had trouble printing a smooth gradient on my Roland SC-540. The gradient shows up with pronounced line sections where it should be smooth. When I zoom in on the screen the gradient looks nice and smooth. The file type I am using is JPEG. Has anyone came across this issue and is there a remedy?

Although from time you time you may have to print a clients file as all they supply is a jpeg. But I would never recommend saving your own files that way. What's happening is your losing a ton of data so like a few have already suggested change your file type to either .EPS or .PDF and you'll be fine!

 

[Signarama Grayslake]

Photoshop..

Photoshop is a great tool for printing anything with drop shadows, inner glows and any transparency effects. Illustrator or other programs tend to cause problems with gradients and effects sometimes, at least when I print to the roland it does...
With photoshop you dont need to flatten transparencies, just save it to a tiff and it automatically flattens it for you.

 

[Gino]

How about a picture or two. That might tell us more what your problem is all about.

 

[Bigdawg]

Photoshop is a great tool for printing anything with drop shadows, inner glows and any transparency effects. Illustrator or other programs tend to cause problems with gradients and effects sometimes, at least when I print to the roland it does...
With photoshop you dont need to flatten transparencies, just save it to a tiff and it automatically flattens it for you.

Wrong. A tif will save from photoshop with layers and doesn't automatically flatten - but versaworks has no issues with it's transparency.

And Photoshop's gradients are better now than they used to be, but still show some of the worst banding I've seen when you don't fiddle with the gradient - or at least that's the way I see it in the files... and I've been a photoshop/illy user since Photoshop 2 and Illustrator 88 with more years than I care to admit in prepress.

In photoshop when you see that banding - and it will show on the screen if you look close enough - you can use a gaussian blur to help minimize the effects and make sure dithering is checked when you apply the gradient so photoshop adds a little noise to the file that hides it.

But the real secret is to understand gradient steps. Output resolution, area covered and the percentage of each color used are huge factors in whether you will see individual steps in the gradient.

 

[Bigdawg]

While looking for a chart to explain the gradients, I ran across this on Adobe's site. Hope it helps:

Open the image in Photoshop and go under the Filter menu, under Noise, and choose Add Noise. When the Add Noise dialog appears, for Amount enter 2, for Distribution choose Gaussian, turn on the Monochromatic checkbox, and then click OK. You’ll see a little bit of this noise when viewing the image onscreen, but when printed at high resolution, the noise disappears and hides the banding.