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: ...... 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.
another damn COREL problem I am once again fring's damn pissed at Corels Lack of software development to enen remotely come close to correct or fixing another dam corel/PP problem
Banding how many time sdo we as deisgners need to hit these guys with a hammer until they oh really we did know there was problem we'll fix ASAP!
In this day and age of technology htis should never happen... and another issuwe why can we post images here F!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I've tried every trick in the book and there should be no banding whEn going from a black to a few point lighter..come on already 999 steps shoudl even cover the invisible spectrum.
ON SCREEN IS omg wtf IS GOING ON..THE BANDING IS THAT BAD SERUIOSLY...IT THAT f'N BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Value 1 80 40 20 100
Value 2: 70 30, 10 80
a i'VE PSOTED BEFORE..i AM REALLY EMBARRSSED TO SAY i USE COREL, BUT AT THSI POIN TINTIME TO LEARN iLLUSTRATOR WILL SET ME BACK A YEAR.
I really hope Corel is looking at my recent post...because I used to rave about corel..NO MORE!!!!!!!!! and if anyone asks I'll tell them to go to the darkside and use Illustrator
I use fountain fills all the time and don't get banding. Don't you think if it was Draw and as bad as you say there wouldn't be more threads about it.
1. It's a function of the device ie the device just isn't capable of the tones or the ICC is not up to it
2. If you look under options/display... preview fountain steps = 256
3. Print/Misc... Fountain steps... whatever you think the printer can handle and you're willing to wait to render
4. Use a decent RIP
If none of that helps and it is something you care about convert to a bitmap at 16pbc and use a small amount of the motion blur filter.
Banding in Draw and Illustrator are about the same. In fact it was discussed years ago and someone revealed that Adobe had actually purchased code from Corel to reduce banding. (not that I have a reference for that but that was the comment)
Whatever the issue is you own it not Corel. And when you type up a sloppy post like that you can expect us to consider your work to be of equal standard.
Yani
Half decent info, *** attitude.