Getting a good orange on a Mimaki CJV150-130

[tmotley]

Hello all. At my place of work, we use a Mimaki CJV150-130. It prints most things quite nicely but seems to have trouble with oranges (despite having a dedicated orange... just put in a new one in fact). It seems to print more reddish tones in most oranges. For example, Pantone 021 is a nice orange that prints reddish. Everything looks great when I print a test. All colors firing appropriately as far as I can tell. I have not tried different color profiles because I don't know anything about them.

I can get a pretty vibrant orange if I overprint multiple times but it also overprints other colors. Specifically, I'm currently trying to print black and orange labels. To get the orange to look good, I can overprint... but then the black looks bad (it's very small black print). I've tried dialing back the density of the black in color adjustment but it still doesn't look good. Right now I can get crisp black with dull orange or smudgy black with bright orange.

I considered printing the orange and black separately but I don't know how I can line up the second print to the first. I've done cuts after printing for labels where it looks for the crops to line up the cuts but haven't tried to print a second file using the same printed crops from the first... Is that possible? Is there a way to ensure perfect alignment of the second file? Am I going at this the wrong way?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Tim

 

[DarkerKat]

We have a different mimaki so I'm not positive if yours will let you do this, but what you are trying to do is "composite printing". If you save multiple copies of your file (one with all the colors, then one with just the orange) you can composite the files together into one print within rasterlink. Might also be work checking in rasterlink to make sure that the orange pantone is calling in the correct lab values.

 

[tmotley]

DarkerKat, you definitely helped me out here! I made a black file and an orange file with the exact same dimensions. I made copies of the orange file and then sent them all along with the black to the Mimaki. On the Mimaki, I went to Composition, selected my four (three orange and one black) files, clicked Composite, and it printed my one label perfectly.

Now I have set up print&cut files to print a bunch of labels. Let's hope that the cut info doesn't mess with the composite printing. After printing the labels, they will be UV laminated and then put back in to cut them out. For this, I will need to have crops turned on. I haven't bothered with crops during my color testing. I assume I just turn the crops on the individual files and then composite them like before?

Thanks for your help!

 

[tmotley]

Update: First attempt was not a success but I now think I have it set. It was only a failure because I didn’t remove the “cut” parts of the orange. I figured I would just leave them there but not actually cut using them… just using the black. Well, Rasterlink told me I can’t have more than one print&cut in a composition. So I removed the cut from the orange and sent it to Mimaki again. This time, they composited seemingly perfect. However, it was the end of the day and I needed to do the Mimake maintenance so I didn’t do the print. We will find out for sure on Monday!