Gradient white print out of Rasterlink??

[White Haus]

Until ONYX decides to figure out how to get us printing cmyk+w on our new UCJV we're stuck using rasterlink. I'd like to meet the people that created this software and have a few words with them....but I digress. Honestly it's insulting using this software after using Versaworks for 11 years and Onyx Thrive for 5.

95% of what we do is reverse printing cmyk images and backing them with white ink. We've been able to (painfully) make that work with the plates and all that but now need to print a gradient white behind some spot graphics.

I've tried using the Mimaki swatches in both Illustrator and Corel and neither will allow me to overprint behind/above a cmyk object, let alone add a gradient to the white.

Normally I could just create a plate from the white file but as far as I can see this will just be a solid percentage of white.

Does anyone have any experience with this in Rasterlink? I'm out of ideas and patience.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Solventinkjet]

I'm not an expert in this particular area so there may be a better way. I'm pretty sure Raterlink won't do white gradients as they come natively from Illustrator or Corel. However my first thought was to make a normal gradient with black and white and then run the color halftone filter on it in Illustrator. That will give you a bitmap halftone gradient that you could use as the white plate. Just my .02.

 

[White Haus]

I'm not an expert in this particular area so there may be a better way. I'm pretty sure Raterlink won't do white gradients as they come natively from Illustrator or Corel. However my first thought was to make a normal gradient with black and white and then run the color halftone filter on it in Illustrator. That will give you a bitmap halftone gradient that you could use as the white plate. Just my .02.

Thanks for this! Gives me another route to explore. I'm not super familiar with the Adobe halftone filters but we did have a tech show us how to create some cool halftones in Photoshop recently.

I think I've made some progress....

If I create a gradient in Illustrator using yellow as the color, then in Rasterlink change the job attribute to "mono color" then tell it to replace yellow with white/white, it seems to work. (Converts the file to white, and has successfully printed a white gradient) Last test will be outputting my cmyk objects as their own file then create a composition w/ cmyk & white elements and see if they'll overprint. I still find it frustrating that you need to go through all these steps and have multiple files for one print. Both onyx (Spot1) and versaworks (RDG_WHITE) have made it so easy to print white, I guess I got spoiled.

I tried playing around with Rasterlink tools and using those swatches and they will come in as white, but not with layers/overprints. I suppose I could try setting up my gradient with that spot color and eliminate the whole yellow to white conversion.

I'll be printing this test file on Monday....fingers crossed.

If anyone else has any tips for cmyk+white printing from Rasterlink I'm all ears.