Customer supplied artwork ??

[Lee Attewell]

Hi Dave,
I’m pretty sure you’d have to put a path around the image. Photoshop does this fairly easily although I’m sure Flexi does it as well. Without a path the cutter’s not going to have a line to follow.

I’m just taking a guess here…

Lee

[Dave Springate]

Hi Leeroy,

The cutting is not a problem mate been doing it with no problems at all from corel, the problem i have is enlarging images that need to be printed onto vinyl without them distorting.

thanks for the reply though !

best rgds
Dave

[Carrie Brown]

Hi dave,

You don’t need to vectorise if the image is a good quality one. If its photo’s I ask for a high res jpeg from the customer. Hopefully they have one!! If its a block colour image it’s sometimes it’s better to vectorise so you get a much clearer print. It all depends on 1. the size of the original artwork to be scanned or supplied on cdrom and the size the image needs to be printed.

What i try to do if I scan an image in at a high resolution, i will do a small test print to see how the image comes out. From there you should be able to either tweak the resolution of your scanner or try to sort a higher resolution image out.

Another thing to consider is if the artwork is going to be viewed at close-up. If its going 20′ in the air, a higher printing resolution will not be needed. On the flip side if its going to be at eye level the image quality will need to be the best possible.

Hope this helps.

Stephen

[Dave Springate]

Thanks Carrie

[J. Hulme]

http://www.scantips.com/basics3c.html

If using jpegs, please ask for uncompressed.

[Nicola McIntosh]

nice link outline!! why uncompressed?

Nik

[Nicola McIntosh]

http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec092301.html

it’s okay outline found a good link to explain!! 😀

Nik

[Rodney Gold]

For digital printing your artwork requirements differ to cutting etc .
The printer can only print 7 colours , so it cant map a single pixel of , lets say light peach, to a single dot
It has to print a “cell” of coloured dots with different spacing etc to fool your eye as to seeing peach. Now the printer might be capable of printing 1400 dots per inch , but its NOT capable of printing 1400 cells per inch , its really only capable of 100-150 cells per inch , and remember it maps a pixel of the graphic to a CELL.
What you need to know is the output size and you need about 100-120 PIXELS per inch of printed output to get really good results.
So if you were printing a 20″ x 10″ graphic , it would have to be 2000 pixels by 1000 pixels in size to get the best print.(this will give an uncompressed file size of 2000x1000x3 = 6 megs (the 3 is cos its an RGB image , if it was a cmyk image , it would be 4)
SIZE is what counts when determining how big you can print and NOT dpi (unless scanning).
For scanning DPI (which is actuallly pixels per inch) there is an easy formula : Output size/input size x 100(120 is better)
So if you had a 2″x1″ pic to blow up to 20″ x 10″ , you would scan at 20/2×100 dpi (1000dpi) to get acceptable output. you can reduce that figure of 100 to 50 or so if doing graphics that are going to be viewed from far away. Some media cannot even possible reolve 50 cells per inch (often called LPI – lines per inch – a term from screens), like meshes and you can go even lower , like a figure of 20. (so a 500 x 300 pixel pic could be printed 25″ x 15″ acceptable on mesh , it could be printed 10″ x 6″ for distant viewing and 5″ x 3″ for a high quality vinyl print)
Cut contours have to be vectors , but you can use a vector cut with a raster graphic.
Your mindset in terms of design etc has to change with digital printing , the only real common link with your camm1 is the contour cutting. You really need a decent raster package like Photoshop CS or the like , sign packages like Flexi and signlab or even Corel act as a “back end” , IE you manipulate in Photoshop and import into corel etc to output to the machine
When you do get your machine , get a copy of Colorip 2.1 (the Roland RIP) and give it a bash as well.
A typical workflow for us is something like this
Ad agency subits a Freehand 10 file , we use Macromedia Freehand to open it , check it’s ok etc , then export out to Ai (illustrator) or EPS
Import in corel 11 and either create contour cuts or change lines to be contour cut into a specific colour that tells the rip to cut those specific colour lines , export that whole file to EPS and then open the EPS in the rip and tweak the settings and print.
The RIP itself is incredibly complex in regard to various settings and If I were you , I would get into colour management theory real fast as what you see vs what you get is NOT the same thing unless you have color workflowed your whole setup. You will have major problems with color workspaces and icc profiles your customer embeds in the graphic.
At the bare minimum for a reasonably accurate colour view on your monitor , you should tell corel color management to simulate CMYK professional output.
There is a very steep learning curve tween simple vinyl cutting and large format printing and knowledge of Photoshop and raster image manipulation is vital.

[Dave Springate]

Hi Rodney,

Your reply is, as always really informative. Thank you very much for your time and help.

Best rgds

Dave

[Mike Grant]

Blimey Rodney 😮 Do you know my shoe size as well! 😆

What a font of knowledge you are, where do you learn all this stuff, where do you find the time to learn all this theory. You are deffinately one in a million on this forum.

Keep up the good work, and if I ever find myself back on your sunny shores I will be sure to look you up.

Urrm! what was the question again?

[davebrittain]

hi ive just aquired a cadett. its troop software you get as the rip ive just put a photo on my van 1800mm by 650mm i just dragged it to the size i wanted in troop although it was a bitmap image even at poin blank is as good as any photo you will see.You can get it to cut the photo out by putting a shape round it and contor cut.

[J. Hulme]

quote Mike Grant:

Blimey Rodney 😮 Do you know my shoe size as well! 😆

What a font of knowledge you are, where do you learn all this stuff, where do you find the time to learn all this theory. You are deffinately one in a million on this forum.

Keep up the good work, and if I ever find myself back on your sunny shores I will be sure to look you up.

Urrm! what was the question again?

😉 I’ve found Rodney on many a forum, always with a superb amount of professional knowledge and has time to explain thoroughly, a true asset to this group, or any other for that matter.
Respect.

Well done mate!

😉