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is there a problem with digital printing with corel 11?
We often design large format digital and screen printing in corel 11 and sometimes hit problems with the printers having problems in opening files – they dont seem to have a high opinion of corel draw . Does anyone else find this and what do you do?
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32 Replies
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Export the file out as an EPS and as tiff or JPEG(JPEG as a last resort)
Check the options when using an EPS , click the “export text as curves” (unless your client has the font you used or needs to change text) and use PS level 1 (you can try 3 as well) -
you are not in there normal work flow so you become hard work so you will have to change to there way or find another printer that welcomes coral i have a problem with people that bring me publisher or quark files – other printers will wecome them.
chris
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EPS and PDF are the standard for digital print files , just tell the ppl to bring it to you in that format. Just about every program can export or save as EPS
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corel (which i use a lot) is great but it previous versions have weaknesses and a lot of repros hate that. It has colour management features which repros hate. So Proofing is biggest issue, what you send may not appear to be the same when you get it back.
EPS/PDF are the best formats for transfering files but it is always a good investment to ask for a proof, to double check the conversion/print/RIP.
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Most of my work is digital printing and I have to confess I avoid Coral as much as I can, mostly because I have no real understanding of it as I never have to use it for anything other than printing, it is anoying from my perspective that I have to pay a full licence but never venture further than the printing functions.
It of course depends so much on what you are printing, at the moment I am laying out a 3 X 3 Popup display system for Trump, this is a curved wall with 3 forward facing graphics and 2 ends, each graphic panel is 2225 X 673 m/m giving a total graphic size of 2225 X 3365 m/m, this can be done in coral (I think) or Illistrator but really for lining up joins etc this is best done in Quark or Indesign, Indesign ofcourse reads Illistrator or PDF files easely, which are better to work with than say EPS.
But horses for courses as they say, Coral good, Quark good but now adays Adobe in front, Illistrator for single pages, Photoshop for graphics and Indesign for mutiple pages.Regards
Russell.
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you pretty much nail the software on the head. That is my personal preference also, however Corel does make a good sign makers program, it does have a large canvas and you can draw 1:1 quite easily with it, illustrator and a few other programs also has that capacity. As with repro, you have to own a lot of programs or just accept eps/pdf only and that can run into problems too.
Software is costly, but Adobe swallowing Macromedia will kill off Freehand hopefully and leave us with Illustrator and Corel. That should be better. Quark is a monkey of a program, Indesign is way good, Photoshop is king for pixels, Illustrator is nice too.
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quote Russell:I am laying out a 3 X 3 Popup display system for Trump, this is a curved wall with 3 forward facing graphics and 2 ends, each graphic panel is 2225 X 673 m/m giving a total graphic size of 2225 X 3365 m/m, this can be done in coral (I think) or Illistrator but really for lining up joins etc this is best done in Quark or Indesign, Indesign ofcourse reads Illistrator or PDF files easely, which are better to work with than say EPS.Regards
Russell.
Sry fella but i have to disagree completely with you on this one, last week i designed one similar pop-up display 4×3, and the words you used were pretty much similar to the ones that the printer used right before i explained him one simple way to do that in Corel, is words after this were OMG could i be wronger about this? I’ve been working the wrong way for soo much time!!
I don’t have the time now but if needed i’ll explain that to you or you can e-mail me at britchenko at hotmail…com and i’ll explain it.
About the others programs i can say i use all except signlab and yes i’m a Corel supporter for a lot of aplications altough i don’t like Photopaint and i prefer to use Photoshop when dealing with pictures everything else goes to Corel when possible, if there was only CorelDraw, Photoshop and Indesign for large publications the world would be such a nice place!! 😀
just my 2p anyway
Britchenko -
I do a lot of large scale digital prints, and corel works well for me.
I design brochures and all sorts of other printing, and send my files to a printing company that uses Corel too. As a result, I have never had a problem getting the result I desire.
I don’t use photoshop often, and frankly find it cumbersome to use, simply because I have not the experience, obviously it is an excellent program tho.
I have been using corel since version 4, and think it really depends on what you have been used too or trained on.
I would have no hesitation doing Russells display in corel at all, and be confident of a good result.
My 2c worth too.
Cheers
Shane -
Britchenko and shane are right, corel is so fast and has so much space to work with, it’s fun.
Quark is not my kind of application for sign industry and I would include InDesign in that too, how can you do things like Weld and shaping, but from a Pre-Press perspective Quark and InDesign make very good EPS/PDF layout programs (and books!)
Dave
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Why are you guys using the design package for tiled printing? The RIP should do that?
We always use the rip for this as it has features like setting overlaps on the fly and some other stuff in terms of what prints which way to assure you get a seamless graphic. -
quote Rodney Gold:Why are you guys using the design package for tiled printing? The RIP should do that?
We always use the rip for this as it has features like setting overlaps on the fly and some other stuff in terms of what prints which way to assure you get a seamless graphic.Rodney, I use the RIP for tiling too, but I was just making the comment that Corel is not as bad a package as some people make out in the printing world.
No offence meant to anyone here of course.
Shane
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hi, yes ours tiles too, was looking at the new version of shiraz and the tiling in that only yesterday. For vehicle wraps we work out the tiles manually so we can make best use of the material space.
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I actually agree Shane , Corel has to be one of the real ‘bargain” packages.
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Of course the RIP would be the ideal for tiling but i have found (designer and aplicator perspective) that a in a variety of aplications you might need diferent bleed measures for each tile that’s the reason i started to do it in Corel coz it’s really easy to do. Another thing, often when i need something printed in tiles and give it to the printers they prefer for there own insurance that it would be already tiled.
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thank you all for your input its so helpful to be able to talk to people in the same business- one last thing last week we designed full colour A1 posters for screen printing – the film bureau asked for AI files and we were unable to create this – the program kept locking – presumably there are limitations
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hi, they may be asking for AI as these are typical cutter files, to produce screen files they need to block out a screen in certain places, however you did say full colour A1 posters so I would go toward B1 litho or for small qtys inkjet
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posters were 2mm showcard-
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hmm… 2mm, that is a bit thick… screen printing come out okay?
our JV3 would do 2mm card but never sure about paper substrates -
quote Gorilla:last week we designed full colour A1 posters for screen printing – the film bureau asked for AI files and we were unable to create this – the program kept locking – presumably there are limitations
The program may lock if you have not enough space on your hard drive for the cache of the file. Just a thought, but I have experienced this myself with exporting to eps.
Hope that helps
Shane
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Thanks again – we still have a problem with our computers locking with big files – what would you guys recommend as a sensible specification for a busy computer using signlab , corel 11 , and illustrator- we may need to upgrade ! At present we have AMD Athlon xp2500 , 1.83GHZ 480MB ram and are using xp home edition service pack 1 – four workstations which are networked
Any suggestions greatly welcome
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480mb of ram will barely run XP let alone anythng else
You need about 5-10 gb of free disc , at leat 1 gb mem and the more potent the processor , the shorter the rip time.
Memory and free HD space will sort you out in the meantime but if you have spent a good few grand on the printer , it’s worthwhile spending on a SOTA and blindingly fast puter too -
quote Gorilla:Thanks again – we still have a problem with our computers locking with big files – what would you guys recommend as a sensible specification for a busy computer using signlab , corel 11 , and illustrator- we may need to upgrade ! At present we have AMD Athlon xp2500 , 1.83GHZ 480MB ram and are using xp home edition service pack 1 – four workstations which are networked
Any suggestions greatly welcome
Rod is right mate,
My graphics machine is a P4, 2.8ghz, 500mb RAM (upgrading to 1gb memory soon), 300gb hard drive space, running XP pro, and I am running a 3 computer network, and my machine slows to a crawl with a realy big file.
I suspect you are making your computer work very hard, and like rod suggests, an investment in a faster machine may be a worthwhile step.
Cheers
Shane -
Sp2 or SP3, the last version of Corel 11 service pack works really well.
“File/Print” does lock and take forever, becareful with that.“File/Publish PDF” then open in Acrobat (reader or Pro) then print will be fast (or read that file into a RIP)
I am currently using a Asus with Amd 64bit 3200 with 32bit windows, loads of drives and 1gb, twin graphics cards (used for gaming) but the machine still struggles in photoshop 7 when editing 1gb RGB image, was quite supprised!
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quote DaveRowland:I am currently using a Asus with Amd 64bit 3200 with 32bit windows, loads of drives and 1gb, twin graphics cards (used for gaming) but the machine still struggles in photoshop 7 when editing 1gb RGB image, was quite supprised!i would put more ram in dave, just a thought, also the amd 64bit is still not able to run at full speed yet 😛
nik
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A 1gb image is pretty massive. Thing is , files that size are actually probably overkill for the printer. At BEST the printer can manage 100 pixels per inch and on some media even that is not possible. One of the better strategies is to reduce the file size to take account of that.
For example on my machine I can only print 54″ wide , so lets say I was doing a 50″ x 100″ graphic , I would work out that at 150 pixels per inch , the grapic size should be 7500 x 15000 pixels x 3 (rgb) which is a 350 gb file. 150 pixels per inch is actually overkill!!!
A 1 gb file would be something that would print perfectly at a massive size.
If this was on banner or billboard , you can most likely drop pixel count per printed inch to round 15-25. So taking a figure of 50 pixels per inch for billboard or wraps which is MORE than adequate , a 6m x 3m print (240″ x 120″) should be 12000×6000 pixels x3(rgb) = 216 mb.
What you need to do is resample the image with the print size in mind.
This will not only allow you to utilize your puters capability better but will save huge amounts of time in manipulating and especially Ripping. -
hi folks, yes I was thinking of more RAM to boost the speed and even a dual core processsor that have just been released, you can guess i am a bit of a tech. 😮 < my eyes
but my post was to show the weakness of a top machine with a Gbyte photoshop image, it can still be slow but <600mb it does fly.
With regards setup of an image, it was a banner and I did knock it down to something like 360dpi and allow the rip to do the work. The golden rule with a RIP is to Match or half the resolution of image, say your print resolution is 720dpi (360dpi, 240dpi or 180dpi would be good). As this RIP doesn’t print with repeating dots (litho style) and more random dots (scotastic) then it doesn’t really matter too much. In our experience however anything under 150dpi prints shocking but it can be okay from a distance but sometimes you send the job to the customer and they look at it and think “that looks bad, wont use them again”… morale is, they designed it in Quark Xpress at A4! and supplied it as eBook PDFs! argh!
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Sorry to add my 2 cents to the original topic.
We use Corel 11 and I am a die hard Corel User. I subscribe to the anything you can do (in another program) I can do better (and faster and easier in Corel) I ahve lots of Signlab designers that test that all the time.
Now where I do find Corel to “fall down” is in its colour space for digital printing. Spot colours are ok as long as you print a chart to compare to and select the right colours. Photographs etc just do not have the versatiliyt in the Kodak colour space compared to the Adobe, using Colour Rip software you can see the 3D model showing the importing of the corel file into LAB and then to the output profile. the same file from Adobe has a better range of colour and consequently the prints are so much more bright and full of depth of color.. inmost cases. My corel prints seem grey in comparison. I unusually get my designer to send tif’s for print in color rip so i dont have to modify them in corel. Im lucky too in that our design company has a monitor that displays pretty much how the image prints on our SP 300. makes like ALOT easier.
WE work with it and if you hadnt seen the Adobe print the Corel one would be fine but now that we know we try to avoid manipulating the image in Draw or Photopaint.
NOW I just have to convince my designer that bigger file sizes and higher res done mean much. 🙂
Jennifer
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A tip , convert your raster graphics to CMYK IN corel and then print , bright and cheerful and not the dull output you often get.
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quote Rodney Gold:A tip , convert your raster graphics to CMYK IN corel and then print , bright and cheerful and not the dull output you often get.
Good tip rodney, I do this too, and the results are very good.
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ok Shane and Rodney why is it when i convert to Cm its flat and GB good co louring – except transparent fades which must be cmyk.
chris
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Chris , it might depend on the RIP , the rendering intent , what you export as, what ICC input and output profile you use, halftone properties etc.
I use Colorip (The Wasatch) and export to EPS , my rendering intent is “perceptual”
I find with digital prinitng , “POP” is what counts mostly , most of my clients are not that concerned with exact colour matching and want attention getting graphics. -
yep colour rip 2.2 but notice its on relative co lour with ICC switched on and separation rule on
so will have a go at perpetual colour it does say pretty next to it
also if i want to do a decent photo print i have to use the older ver 2 on my laptop cos the shadows are so Superior for the same settings that i can find anyway
thanks
chris
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