-
Printing black onto mesh!
Hi guys,
Printing some mesh at the moment, the bulk of which is black, however, trying to get a nice solid black is proving a little difficult.
have tried just 100 percent black, also C10 M10 Y10 and K10, still comes out a bit weak, any ideas?
Thanks
Chris.
-
16 Replies
-
this is gonna sound daft mate… sorry if i am missing the obvious but do you mean it looks weak veiwed as a perforated film, or do you mean the print output is weak?
hope i explained that ok? 😕
-
Rob, it looks week before the backing is removed. The Seiko/Onyx also prints a colour band down the right hand side so you can check all the heads are printing ok. The black there comes out well solid (which must be 100% k, as it prints all 6 colours there),
When I set the artwork to 100%k it is nowhere near as strong as the stripe printed down the side,
The final output will be ok, but like I say, could be stronger!
-
i am probably still a bit unsure what i am saying mate, maybe Andrew will see this post and explain better.
we did some controvison and also some banner mesh, ill be honest. i thought the prints were pretty crap on it. however, on a vehicle/window
they did just look like any i have seen out on the rounds. 😕
ill see if Andrew can shed any light on this, if not i am sure someone will be of more help. 🙂 -
Thanks Rob, I did try a small piece first and when I pulled the backing off leaving just the mesh and held it up, it looked ok.
Just can’t understand why the black in the stripe would look much better than the black on the banner, need to print another one off tomorrow so if I get the chance will take a pic and hopefully it will show what I mean.
-
Hi Chris. We had the same issue, and I couldn’t figure it out either. Printed all black, no design on perforated vinyl, and it was a bit weak. Thought the saturation should have been stronger. Customer was okay, but we weren’t and have done other things full colour saturation, no problem, just the black was an issue. It would have helped it he wanted something on it, but it is for a hallowe’en spooky shop, and he just wanted coverage on the windows. Must be something with black, but interesting your stripe was stronger. Ink cartridge need changing?? If you figure it out, let me know, because we don’t want to run through that again either. Thanks.
Janice
-
as we thend to print banner at a lower res and less passes than any think else this does show up as weeker blacks inc mesh but increase the no of passes and the colour comes back as you say increase the c & m in to the mix helps sometimes i have converted the image to a bit map before rip and improves a lot so it has to be a rip setting i dont understand between raster and vector inputs.
another chris
-
Try slowing down the head speed, or put 2-3 seconds between passes. Also make black with 20-30% of C,M,Y and 100% black. But for me, slowing down works for now. I think that on Mesh ink didn’t have enought time to dry between passes and flow out in the holes.
-
Did some interesting test prints this afternoon, with various fills of black, from just 100% to to 40% CMY and 100% K.
I saved these squares as both eps and tiff. The eps file showed no difference in the fills and looked washed out, the tiff file showed the black getting deeper the more I added to the CMY.
So learning from this, if I need a good black again, I will fill 30% CMY and 100% K and save the file as tiff!!
-
I take it you have a profile installed on your RIP.
It may be that the profile is set differently to work on vector file (I take it your eps is a vector).
May have a profile embedded within your TIFF.
Not certain of the details of your RIP / Printer so I may be giving duff info.
On using Shiraz I believe you can assign different profiles to different class of images (RGB / CMYK).
Could try turning profiles off, you can then get the true % you are placing in file. Still run with a calibration, linearization and Ink Limit, just avoid a profile.
-
yeah, have a profile set up for the mesh and printed both the eps and tiff out using the same profile!
-
Is the EPS a vector?
If so I can only imagine that the RIP is viewing this file differently to a bitmap image.
I take it the EPS is CMYK not RGB once saved.
What is your RIP?
-
Both the eps and the tiff were created in Corel draw, both filled CMYK (they are just squares of different CMYK fills (all 100% k and from 10 – 40% CMY) to see which printed the best. I added text to the squares so I knew which was which and converted everything to curves.
The RIP is Onyx and the printer is a Seiko Colourpainter 64S
-
sounds like black ink limits… the stripes down the side I suspect are not going through the profile calculation.
I suspect the Mesh profile has been tuned to make sure that it does not saturate the mesh by putting down too much ink, so the black will be weak.
On JV3 we have Overprint which makes the printer print over the top n amount times which darkens the print.
If I was doing vinyl I would do a black with 45C 45M 45Y and 100K and this gives a strong heavy gloss black.
Change media profile to banner/vinyl stock and see what happens.
-
Thanks Dave, can you explain why I would get a better result from a tiff than from an eps tho (same file just exported in different format)?
-
try adding more cyan….go up to 80% if you can.
-
Chris, just turn off "Use printer color profile" when exporting EPS from Corel.
Log in to reply.