Lighter shaded box around drop shadows

[Gary Birch]

Hi Warren
I had a similar problem with some artwork I was supplied for print. I ended up exporting the artwork as a tiff and printing from that. You might want to try that.

Cheers

Gary

[Glenn Sharp]

Warren……it sounds like a similar problem to the one Hugh had when he was printing his reflective tape packets…

I can’t remember if he posted how he’d resolved it but no doubt he will be able to tell you

[Warren Beard]

Thanks will try a Tiff, can’t remember if Hugh posted a solution.

cheers

Warren

[Warren Beard]

Tiff works 😛 it poses a few other problems in Illustrator but at least it prints OK now.

cheers

Warren

[Tobias Redig]

Can try to expand appearence and see if that helps anything. Basically turns the drop shadow into an image embedded into the file.

[Warren Beard]

Digging up this old thread as I still have this issue, I work around it when I do my own stuff but getting print ready files from customers is causing me headaches when I get this problem.

Where ever there is an image file on or part of a solid background it makes the solid area print lighter like the picture attached.

I have a work around but doesn’t seem right and is very time consuming and does lose a little bit of quality.

Anybody have any further ideas on it?

cheers

Warren

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[Martin Grimmer]

Hi Warren,

I had a slightly different problem a while back – where I seemed to have the boxing problems around clipping masks from customer /designer supplied PDF – whereby original box would somehow show up slightly lighter).

In the end I selected it all, and flattened transparency (object/flatten transparency in Illustrator) – but also ticked the "Preserve Alpha Transparency" option box. Seemed to improve it.

May be worth a try?

MArtin

[Paul Hughes]

Hi Warren

dont know what software you are using but in corel this can be caused by the background object being rendered in CMYK and the the drop shadow effect being rendered in RGB. by exporting as a tiff you are most likely converting it all to the same thus unknowingly curing the problem.

Paul

[Warren Beard]

Hi Guys

Yes a Tiff solves the problems or a high res jpeg straight out of Photoshop works well to but I don’t always know if I’m going to have the problem when clients supply me print ready files and I can’t always open in Illustrator due to fonts and effects etc so I always have to rasterise the entire file in photoshop and save as tiff or jpeg.

This is very annoying and always thought it was my old rip that did it but it happens on my Versaworks as well so presume it’s a PDF or Illustrator issue?

I would like to be able to tell some of my regular customers how to avoid this to save me the time wasted of having to alter their file but I can find a solution. Well let me correct that…

I have a solution but would like to find a cure to prevent it.

Cheers

Warren

[Tim Painter]

Most Litho printers ask for drop shadows to be converted to CMYK bitmaps with transparency.

Do customers send ai or PDF files?

[Warren Beard]

PDF files, it’s been a while since I tried to find a solution, I always just do the work around but is annoying 🙄