-
Banding on Gradients?
Hey All,
I did a search and tried some of the various techniques and it showed mixed results…
I tried adding noise filters, saving under diff files, etc. but nothing is very satisfactory???
My test piece was a basic 7" x 3" rectangle with green to wht. My main question is the banding I get is mainly the grey spots. Is there a way i can get rid of the spots??
Also, any other suggestions on the banding issue?
Thanks
-
10 Replies
-
Rasterise your gradients perhaps? The problem may well ber coming from your RIP software and not your printer.
-
As Pauly said, convert to bitmap and add some Gaussian blur, with litho printing we drop the linescreen too but I don’t think that’s relevent if you are digital.
Alan D -
I tried rasterizing… slightly better, but still banding…
the bitmap option i tried as well, but perhaps i did something wrong, but the color actually changed when i printed the bitmap file???
Why is it that there are the grey spots as the gradients move? I noticed that on other prints that I’ve done in the past (Red to Yellow) and also noticed the grey spots? What is the reasoning behind this?
Thanks everyone!
-
Im not sure sure what setup your running, but perhaps your expecting too much out of the equipment you have? Has the problem only just started?
Possibly a profiling/linierisation problem?
-
I’ve found that my rip (colorip) will add a scattering of black into solid colours such as magenta or yellow even though the eps file is for a pure yellow of magenta, I assume this is a colour profile thing and maybe you could bypass the colour profile, I think most rips have this option.
Do you get banding on solid print colours, try a print using solid blocks of CMYK to check the heads for each colour.
Steve
-
Thanks everyone!
This site has been such a tremendous help and resource!!!! (So glad I found it)…
quote :Do you get banding on solid print coloursNo – only on the gradients…
I believe this may be the most precise point thus far
quote :but perhaps your expecting too much out of the equipment you have?I have recreated my files with a gradient from photoshop… we’ll see how that goes for now…
Thanks again all!
-
What program were you using before, CorelDraw only prints/exports gradients with 64 steps by default you can increase this to 255, this makes quite a difference to bigger gradients.
Steve
-
i use illustrator…
is there such a menu in illustrator (to increase the # of steps in agradient?)
-
If using photoshop put a gausian blur on them.
goop
-
quote Canadaguy:i use illustrator…is there such a menu in illustrator (to increase the # of steps in agradient?)
Illustrator should export at the maximum number of steps. There are 256 steps for each colour in PostScript level 2. If you are going from 0% K to 100K there are 256 bands of colour. If the example were of a 3 m long box with the gradient each of the 256 bands will no doubt be really obvious. If you are going from 50K to 100K there are only 128 steps… This also works backward. If the gradient is small in size the relatively low resolution of the output device cannot image enough bands. Because of this some of the suggestions posted earlier about doing this in PhotoShop and adding noise, or a blur, etc. are really worth looking into.
Sometimes RIP software will have controls to add noise to images like yours to reduce the visible stepping.
As for the spots, I have a theory about the profile, calibration, and media. In involves them not being correct and at certain points the CCM is incorrectly telling the printer to produce spots that add up to neutrals. I just pulled that out of my a$$ because I don’t know how big the dots are. I could be full of the stuff that somes of out the a$$… who knows.
Good luck.
Log in to reply.