Fountain fills and transparencies

I am using CorelDraw X7. I am having trouble with fountain fills and transparencies.
I design prints for fabrics, which are used to make Alpine Skiing race suits. The printing process is a one where the printer prints dye onto paper and then the paper is pressed at a high temperature and pressure onto the fabric; dye sublimation printing.
I am creating designs and patterns using Corel Draw and using fountain fills or transparencies to blend on colour/layer into another smoothly. I set my fountain steps at 999 (maximum) and also use the smooth button to blend the colours further. The fills and transparencies look great on screen but as soon as they are printed I have lines across the blend. This is especially bad when the contrast between the two colours is great. It does not print as a smooth seamless blend of one colour into another.
Can anyone help me.
Thanks Dave

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0 Ronny Axelsson over 7 years ago

Dave Stewart said:
I set my fountain steps at 999 (maximum) and also use the smooth button to blend the colours further.
And this is where it goes wrong. :-)
Never, never change from the default, which is "locked" (value is greyed out).

With the default setting, the fill is described as "fill from color A to color B", and when printing to a postscript printer or exporting to for example PDF, this is the information the fill will be based upon.
This will ensure that the fill will look and print as good as possible.

I understand it is tempting to change to a higher value (the greyed out box indicates 256 steps "only") but the result will probably not get any better, and there's a big risk it will in fact be worse.
I made this mistake myself a couple of years ago, with a fill going from a dark brown to almost black. Though it would be a good idea to change to 999 steps and then print, but the result was awful.
It turned out that the only difference between the two colors was around 20% of black, and by unlocking it made up the fill in 20 clearly visible steps, not 999 as expected. Ruined a large format print that way. :-(
Then reprinted with the fill locked and the result was perfect.

So the general rule is: ALWAYS leave the fountain fill steps setting locked (well, there may exceptions but...).
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0 Ronny Axelsson over 7 years ago in reply to Ronny Axelsson

Forgot to mention that if you export a fountain fill to PDF 1.4 or higher with the default settings, the fill will still be a fountain fill in the PDF (as long as it is a fill supported by the format).
But if you unlock the fill steps it will instead be converted to solid colored objects, one for each step in the fill.
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0 Dave Stewart over 7 years ago in reply to Ronny Axelsson

Hey Ronny Thanks for your input. As I said to David I have actually worked out that if i create a background fill in Photopaint using the same fountain or Gradient fill tool and import that background (as a bitmap) into CorelDraw it prints perfectly as a really nice smooth gradient between colours. Instead of the crap looking steps I was getting trying to print the vector. Really nice. Stoked.
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0 Ronny Axelsson over 7 years ago in reply to Dave Stewart

As long as it works for you.
You could probably get a similar result by converting the vector fountain fill to a bitmap in Draw, like Myron suggested,
but you should also be able to export/print a fountain fill as is, if you make sure the steps setting is locked.

FWIW, some transparencies and fills are very unpredictable when exporting or printing and therefore it is often recommended to "flatten" such effects.
This means that they are converted to one or several bitmaps before exporting or printing.
Vector objects on top, like text for example, can be left untouched to ensure they print razor sharp.
Flattening is often performed on a copy to avoid destroying the original vector objects.
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