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.
OK, just had a look at your printer specs. True resolution is 600dpi (class 2400 is for Hp 600 dpi x 4 colours, wihich DOES NOT make 2400 dpi). The most you can get from that is 80 lpi (I'd place my bet on 63-65 lpi screens though). If that's fine by you - only you can tell - it's fine by me (and everyone else). If it's not, you should go to a professional offset printer and print your document.
That's the ONLY thing you can do.
bcnintegrated said: What I have to suggest is to go to a professional offset printer to print your files..... Sorry to disappoint you.
What I have to suggest is to go to a professional offset printer to print your files.....
Don't worry, you didn't. We came to the conclusion that we needed to upgrade our printer and did so in September last year...about 9 months ago!!
I assumed this thread was dead and was surprised to find an email in my inbox regarding this....but 10 out of 10 for effort though.
bcnintegrated said: ...... you should go to a professional offset printer and print your document. That's the ONLY thing you can do.
...... you should go to a professional offset printer and print your document.
Actually, it wasn't the ONLY thing we could do. We just upgraded our printer rather than having to take our stuff to someone else all the time. Ultimately it was worth the investment.
At least I hope you got a true 1200x1200 dpi printer, so you don't get any similar problems in the future.
We did a little better than that in fact.
We were keen to see if other brands could do any better because, In addition to the misleading information we got about the HP's capabilities, we also weren't very happy with its resource useage; it would only use 40-50% of its supplies before demanding that we replace them (reporting them as empty, but they weren't by any stretch of the imagination).
I took a couple of the cartridge thingies apart to see how they worked and I was a bit annoyed to see that they were still so full....not quite as annoyed as my wife was when I appeared before her with yellow, black, cyan and magenta streaks all over me.....and had left a trail of yellow toner footprints everywhere....you would have thought that I would stop after the first "mishap" but I thought "ah well, how much worse can it be?".... *
Call me tight, but it seemed wasteful and I noticed that others were complaining of the same thing.
The xerox machine is much better all round and although it seems a little greedier, you get more bang for your buck. I have yet to find anything that it can't print to a professional quality; that is, what I consider professional quality but I'm just an end-user so what would I know
The long and short of this is that Corel wasnt the problem. Corel works just fine and dandy provided you have a decent printer or print within your printers limits (which can be a lot more limiting than you realise!). what might have been nice (as it would have saved time) is for Corel to report to me that I was trying to do something beyond the listed printers capabilities or perhaps just to have said "printing such and such to this printer will look dreadful" or "your printer manual is lying: it can't do this". A bit redunadant perhaps given that I knew that as soon as my streaky picture appeared, but it would have made me realise that I wasnt doing something technically wrong as such, just pushing my luck with the printer. It might also have been handy for Corel to warn me that my local printing bureau was staffed by fast food operatives. But I guess there are limits.
* Be careful if you open a laser printer toner cartidge. They practically explode coloured toner in your face and all over everything within 6 feet. It is exceptionally difficult to clean......