Printing on frosted

[David Rogers]

Choose a dense frosted material – use it to simulate the white component.

Personally I like Ritrama PTA – work well for me…but only used for certain applications – you can’t simulate ‘opal’ acrylic and try to use it as a lightbox / transparency.

Dave

[Marko]

Thanks Dave, but that´s not exactly what I´m after.

Let´s say there is a picture with different shades of blue and you print it on white vinyl and it comes out as it should.
If you print the same pic on frosted it gets a little on the purple side, don´t you think?
What do you do to make the blues come out right?

One way is naturally just to fiddle with the colours on your favourite software, but is there something precise to be done?

[David Rogers]

Ah, I see what you want to do.

In short – you can’t. Physical impossibility.

The white base point cannot be moved to get a true rendition of colours. The transparent inks we use rely on the luminosity of the white behind them to provide their colour. You either have to accept that everything will be out OR treat it as an ‘effect’ or by-product of printing on frosted – no amount of compensating / fiddling will give you the same result as printing on white.

Even reducing the individual component colours to print more/less in favour of the desired image won’t work. The frosted is just too far removed from a solid white – and images will look different depending on whether front lit, back lit of a proportion of both.

Dave

[Marko]

Yes, I know it´s impossible to reproduce exact colours, that´s why I asked
"as accurate as possible".
Meanwhile I´ve been playing with the colours on a pic and I´m quite happy with the outcome.
Naturally it´s not as original, neither was it meant to be, just wanted the blues to be blues not purple.

I´ll keep playing with this, prints on frosted do look nice on some occasions…

Thanks.