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Printing deep black on a VP540
Hi All
Is there a better way of printing solid black on a VersaCamm? At the minute I design in illustrator and RIP in VersaWorks and the black (when printed onto Oracal 3551) comes out slightly banded with a green tint. Anyone know a way to produce proper black on this printer?
Many thanks
John
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14 Replies
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for true black, use preserve primary colour in colour management settings.
if your design is 100/100/100/100 you can use a spot colour replace in special colours.
if the design is just 100%k then cms of sign and display will preserve 100%k.
make sure you are not using the rgb colour chart in illi or corel.
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Thanks I’ll give it a go.
John
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you could also try the following in Versaworks in the job settings if you go to colour management and change the setting to density control only this will give you a solid black try it
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the problem with density control only is that it does no colour management, so it is not suitable for general day to day printing and should only really be used when profiling into versaworks or as a final resort if the files supplied have very strange make-ups.
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Mark this method works extremely well, but can it be applied to gradients? I have a file to print with a lot of black on it, but there is one black to white gradient on the same file. When i print using this method you can see that the black prints using only black ink with a very fine droplet pattern, but the black to white gradient still uses 4 colours. Any ideas?
Thanks
John
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which method did you use?
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Preserve primary colours.
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make sure that the gradient, when exported is not being converted to bitmap.
also in the gradient make up, make sure that it is definitely cmyk palette and it just uses K.
what design app are you using?
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I use Illy CS3. I always use the CMYK palatte. Gradient makeup is K only, but I have added a gaussian blur to prevent it banding.
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be very careful if your doing a lot of black with all the values set to 100%
it will eat your ink up! -
Adding 20% cyan used to give me a nice rich black on my versacamm.
Nothing beats great profiles though.
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Create 100% k ink in user’s palettes/custom spot colors. Name it EG PureBlack. In Versa works, in Spot color settings create a new palette and in this palette create the color with the same name. When import file which contents that spot color VW will automatic recognize it and print it as it is defined 100% black. The same way you can do other spot colors.
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quote Jason Xuereb:Adding 20% cyan used to give me a nice rich black on my versacamm.Nothing beats great profiles though.
I add egual %’s of cyan and magenta in the mix, gives a really rich black too.
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I remember once when I first started I was doing yellow and black warning labels and the black was so rich it wasn’t drying. Then my magenta cartridge went out. I was scratching my head until I checked the artwork 100% of all ink. No wonder 🙄
I think you need to find what works best for which media without going over the top. It depends on the ink limits of the profile you are using also.
We’ve had our machine calibrated and profiles made and my blacks are awesome even with 100% K
Only on some materials I will jack the black up a bit.
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