Ripping Problem

[Gino]

We were just discussing in our shop today about getting a file ready to print to our 540 VersaCamm [We’re using VersaWorks, Illustrator, Photoshop and Flexi 8]. The others are telling me, there is no way to send a file to rip directly from Illustrator with a ContourCut line if there is a raster image in the file and the whole thing is 10” x 16” and must be blown up to 10' x 16'. I know you could do this two years ago, because I did it, but I wasn’t using CS2. We were Illustrator 10 at the time.
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Anyway, the argument is that… the only way is to take your small file in Illustrator and blow it up to the finished size you want, take it over to Photoshop, flatten it and then bring it back to Illustrator and add the ContourCut line to it.
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Is this right or is there another way of doing it all in Illustrator and going directly to rip ??
<o> </o>
Gino

 

[mark in tx]

Why not use Flexi to put the contour cut on the file? It does that very well.

Open the file in Flexi, use the magic wand to get the "marching ants", go to the bitmap dropdown menu, invert selection, convert marquee to shape, click off the picture(deselect), then sweep the arrow across the whole thing, go to the arrange dropdown menu, mask, mask.
Now select contour cut from effects dropdown, set the contour distance.

Now enlarge the print to size and send to RIP.

Do it a few times and it becomes second nature, much easier than having Illustrator rasterize a file, and shortens your workflow.

 

[mark in tx]

side question, if I understand correctly, why are you using versawerks when you have flexi?