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Need Help Saturation...Flexi vs Illustrator

okeesignguy

New Member
I use Flexi for pretty much everything...I have a designer that uses AI ...
I print using versa works...
Why do his files lay down tons more ink than mine...?
Black is a great example...sometimes his files lay down so much ink it is almost thick...
Mine is sometimes so "thin" that it isn't even dark or rich...

Why???
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Dumb question, but could it be something as simple as CMYK values? Lots of people just use a 100% Black, which often outputs as a really dark gray.

Under the Preferences menu in Adobe Illustrator there is a setting called "Appearance of Black," and the default settings are On Screen, Display All Blacks as Rich Black and Printing/Exporting, Output All Blacks as Rich Black. So it's not difficult to get deep blacks in Illustrator, even the user messes up and uses a 100% Key type of black. It's easy to create custom swatches for Rich Black in Adobe Illustrator.

I do a lot of design work in CorelDRAW. I've used two Rich Black formulas in that application. When we were using our old (and now retired) Roland thermal inkjet printer my Rich Black formula was C30, M30, Y30 and K100, which keeps total ink under 200. We received some customer provided artwork once that had all four CMYK values at 100. The ink was literally starting to drip across the vinyl as the print scrolled out of the printer. With our Latex and Flatbed printers I use a 300 total ink black: C75, M68, Y65 and K90.

BTW, I used CASmate and Flexi for design work in the past, and still dabble in it some on our production computers. But I moved entirely to CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator for the design work simply because the type handling is so much better. Across the board the "CAS" apps still don't have all the features of OpenType fully implemented. It took Corel until version X6 to do so. Now Variable Fonts are growing more popular. On top of that Illustrator supports SVG Color Fonts. Illustrator has a ton of great plug-ins available (particularly from Astute Graphics).
 

karst41

New Member
Flexi Sign has a few basic print options to choose from.

When I am ripping critical files I will let Flexi rip under the Color Correction mode.
Under this mode it will recreate black using CMYK across the board.
Looks like Mud.

When you select No Color Correction the rip will send the numbers you entered.

Adobe Rips are freaking outstanding in the color management and especially so with CMYK. However You get size limitations with adobe.
 

balstestrat

Problem Solver
Adobe Rips are freaking outstanding in the color management and especially so with CMYK. However You get size limitations with adobe.
As far as I know Flexi doesn't have a Adobe RIP engine, which makes it cheaper than Onyx for example. So you can actually get some hiccups sometimes because of that.
 

okeesignguy

New Member
Thank you for your replies and help and I will look further into them today...

That being said....I might have not stressed it enough when I said "Black is a great example"
"Black is a great example"................I meant that literally...

It is ALL colors when it happens....Black is an example...

Thanx again!
 

okeesignguy

New Member
ok.....that did make quite a difference...
I just did a little test print both ways...of black...
I will try it on a whole print later...
Thanx!!!
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
karst41 said:
Adobe Rips are freaking outstanding in the color management and especially so with CMYK. However You get size limitations with adobe.

The size limitations aren't quite as much an issue anymore. The Illustrator 24.2 (CC 2020) June update added the large canvas mode, which expands the maximum artboard size up to 2275" X 2275". The AI 24.3 August update added some new typographic features that make sign design much easier in Illustrator (font height variations, snap to glyph options, align to glyph bounds). The CC 2021 suite of applications will likely be introduced next week at the Adobe MAX conference.
 
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