Hi! Im wondering if anyone can help because Ive been trying to fix this for a few days now and Im getting close to my deadline!
I have designed our company brochures in coreldraw 12 and found that the linear gradient fountain fill Im using for the background is causing really bad colour banding when its printed. It looks great on screen, but the banding is far too bad when printed.
The local print shop tried printing the pages out with the same effect. Both they and I are using colour laser printers. In my case, the printer is an HP laserjet 2550L. Not the creme de la creme by any means, but it prints out photo quality colour images in a more than adequate quality to suit our needs. Therefore I dont understand why a simple thing like a fountain fill should print out so badly. Ive tried using both the postscript and the PCL versions of the printer driver, with and without the Postscript description language file. I have also followed the advice of the documentation and adjusted the number of fountain steps etc.
Some of the settings made a little bit of a difference, but I dont really understand the meaning of screen frequency or how that relates to the image or the resolution.
Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated!
EK
I'll keep it simple. Basic pre-press pricipals. If you try to get 133lpi on a 600dpi printer, you will always get banding no matter how many steps you put in the box. Period. Even 133 lpi on a 1200dpi printer might cause banding (has happened to me many times). The only way, is to keep reducing lpi (raster) until you get a decent result (however, I believe your printer should know that already, funny he didn't tell you).
And remember Class 1200 or Class 2400 dpi IS NOT 1200 or 2400 dpi. It's only 600 dpi with a touch from your printer manufacturer. What I have to suggest is to go to a professional offset printer to print your files rather than the next corner express printshop.
Sorry to disappoint you.