gradient print awful

[gabagoo]

I printed a file today that came to me as a 3mb pdf file.

I opened it in acrobat and exported it out as a 150 dpi tif.

Ripped it from Flexi and now that I am ready to laminate I am horrified at what I am seeing. The gradients seem to instead of feathering away to white, just end abruptly and very noticeably in different angles around the print.
I asked the designer here to open the file in photoshop and lets look closely at it, and you can see these faint drops of the gradient, but it seems Flexi has exagerated them and have made them very noticeable
not sure what to tell the customer or how I can get Flexi to rip them properly...any ideas?

 

[gabagoo]

Well I tried taking that pdf file and opened it in signlab8 and sent it to Flexi as a pdf file from there and as a tif file...printed both and could see within 3 inches of printing that nothing has changed....
Told the customer to tell his customer to send me the native files so we can see whats happening...... sounded good and will get me by until I figure this out

 

[jayhawksigns]

Have you tried a different profile in Flexi? It seem that how well profiles are made really shows in the gradients.

 

[bob]

If you can manage to add just a taste of noise to the gradient before you flatten the image it will become far more civilized.

Flexi's RIP often seems to process a gradient in a bitmap with way too much emphasis on transition points. It's almost as if it wants to enhance the boundary. This is a Good Thing when processing anything but a gradient. The added noise tends to moderate the transition points and works to confound this annoying habit.

 

[McDado]

Open PDF in Photoshop, as 200dpi, and give filters/NOISE 0,5%, save as JPG.
Work for me...