I have designed a banner 4500x1580mm that has several intense drop shadows. I was taught that in order to print drop shadows you need to convert them to bitmaps, but that makes the file massive - the PDF file is 483MB, and is too much for the ripping software.
What else can I do with drop shadows that makes them printable without making the file so incredibly large?!
Please help! been struggling now for 8 hours!
The answer starts with what output device. If it's a commercial inkjet you can most likely reduce the resolution of you shadows down to 100 or 125 DPI. I5 38ll still be a large file but as small as it can be for quality. After that in the PDF you can set your image compression to make the file smaller.
In my world who cares about a 450 MB file? No biggie, use a file transfer and forget about it.
Hey divanc,
As David mentions a 450mb file is actually nothing crazy at all. I would say it's maybe a medium file size. We often print files sometimes over 2gb or more without issue.
In addition to what David mentions another thing you can try is by exporting the file as a flattened tiff file which will make the file size even larger but you will be able to retain high quality, high resolution drop shadows in addition to everything else.
The reason why the file size shouldn't matter when using a tiff is because it's already flattened and rasterized and one of the things that needs to happen in the rip process is exactly that which is why it can sometimes take so long to process.
Personally I find when dealing with large bitmap effects like shadows that it actually rips faster when exported as a tiff because the rasterization has already taken place through DRAW itself so the rip doesn't need to do it again.
Hopefully this helps.