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can anyone tell me how to do a gradiant fill in Illustrator?
We have some vector .eps files, created in illustrator, that contain gradient fills – say a flame with a fill going from yellow to red.
when printed via Roland Colorip to the versacamm using ecosolv inks, the gradients contain thick different colored lines as it goes from one color to another – anyone who has tried to print gradients with a versacamm will know what i mean.
Apart from rasterizing the image before hand in something like photoshop ( i like the simplicity of the vector image, plus i need it to be smaller in file size and scalable up and down ! ), does anyone have any advice on how to make the gradients print more like you see on the screen – a graduale change in colour…
cheers
Danny
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6 Replies
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This has been discussed before, and it a was a problem that i encountered
which almost made me go grey trying to work it out.You can mess around with the fountain fill amounts within the eps options,
but ive always found the print will still band, even using a large fountain fill
amount.The only way ive got good results is to add a tiny amount of noise in PS.
(i mean tiny…about .2%)
import it back into corell or whatever else your using as a jpeg, add your cut line and print etc. exporting it as an eps.Funnily enough I had to do a job today using exactly the this method and they printed and looked fine, no banding at all
Hope this helps.
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thanks for the advise. I was trying to avoid that route, but if its the only way !
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Funnily enough I have only today been experimenting with fountain fills using corel draw and printing on a cadet. I discovered that if I produce artwork say 10% of actual size, introduce the fountain fill then resize to actual size before printing I get some distinct “steps” in the gradient. However if I make the artwork actual size then introduce the gradient fill the gradient is much smoother.
I was interested in your experience Mark and wonder how to go about adding some “noise” to a file when producing the JPG to reduce the banding effect.
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There was some discussion regarding banding on the Corel Newsgroup and a practical way was to convert to bitmap (ie not vector with a gradient) and add Gaussian blur to it.
Alan -
Here is how I do it, there may be afaster way but i havent found one yet!
As an example say you take the letter “G” 12″ high in corel. Add say a 1″ black outline and a graduated fill in the body of the letter. Break the letter apart making sure to make the outline an object.
Select the part of the letter with the fill and export as an eps. Open the file in photoshop and apply the noise filter. Add a small amount, about 1.5% seems to work ok, you cant actually see any difference unless you zoom right in to the image. Use the uniform distribution method when asked. Save the image as a jpeg or tiff making sure that the size ratio
remains constant, i would make the dpi setting no lower than say 120 dpi.Import the saved image back into corel. Select the black outline from earlier and then add your cut line to the outside of the outline. Position
the outline over your imported fill. When happy export the lot to your rip
as an eps and then print and cut away….You will find that the banding has gone.
Try it with one letter with the PS treatment and one without and you will see the difference.You can also do the above within corel, turning the fill into a bitmap and then using the media filters but i found the corel interface for this task anoying.
Hope this explains it ok
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Thanks for the explanation. I’ll give it a go in Corel Draw
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